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Introduction
Imagine an individual ranged against an empire. If that sounds like a
grossly unequal situation, imagine that the empire is among the world’s
biggest and most powerful of its time. You would think the imbalance of
power would be too great for even a semblance of a serious contest.
However, the Maratha Shivaji Raje Bhosle, son of Jijabai and Shahaji Raje
Bhosle, did not merely put up a fierce fight against the mighty Mughal
empire when it was at the height of its glory under its sixth emperor,
Aurangzeb, in the seventeenth century. He actually sparked a movement
that coursed through the Deccan and sowed the seeds of the empire’s fall
and destruction. In the process, Shivaji set up his own independent state,
anointing himself Chhatrapati bearer of the chhatra or royal umbrella. He
fashioned his own template of governance and of political and revenue
administration, framed policies of responsible and responsive conduct for
the new state’s officials, both civilian and military, and gave robust
expression by way of words and actions to values of religious plurality
at a time when Aurangzeb was actively and aggressively distorting those
values.
Chhatrapati Shivaji is a singular figure in the early modern history of India
because he shaped a political revolution in his native Deccan which had
implications for the entire map of the Mughal empire, which included in its
sweep Afghanistan in the north-west and Bengal in the east. When he was
born in 1630, the western part of the Deccan he came from had three
Islamic sultanates: the Nizam Shahi of Ahmadnagar, the Adil Shahi of
Bijapur, and the Qutub Shahi of Golconda. While all three were constantly
warring, the Mughals, ever increasing in strength, were pressing in from the
north in a bid to conquer the southern parts and wipe out the sultanates. The
constant warfare of these four kingdoms caused huge turbulence in the
Deccan, unsettling populations and fitfully shifting the contours of its
politics. The Marathas of the western Deccan had emerged as highly
competent military personnel in the sixteenth century, but they were
engaged entirely in serving one or the other of these four powers, either as
generals who took and implemented orders or as foot soldiers.
Shivaji’s father, Shahaji Raje Bhosle, was a military general of note. He
played a stellar role in propping up the Nizam Shahi Sultanate in its last
years in the 1630s; he had, besides, important stints with the Adil Shahi
rulers of Bijapur and also a short one with the Mughals. Astoundingly,
Shivaji launched his rebellion in his teenage years by capturing four hill
forts belonging to Bijapur. He later had to backtrack to save his father but
continued to swim against the main political current of his times, which
was, for the Marathas, to join one or the other well-established kingdoms.
He persisted with his rebellious actions, forming a solid, cohesive bond
with the ordinary, nameless people and peasants of the hills, and winning
friends and comrades who would help him raise the political structure he
was seeking to create. His opponents realized that though he was an outlier,
the Maratha rebel was a clear and present threat because of his natural
charisma which always disarmed people his smart strategizing, his
military skills and his leadership.
Aurangzeb was on top of the world at the time Shivaji attacked his
territories but as a sharp and alert military commander himself, he was not
dismissive of Shivaji. Just like Bijapur had done before him, he publicly
called Shivaji all sorts of names, describing him as ‘a mountain rat’,1 yet
immediately directed the full might of the empire against the emerging
rebel. Aurangzeb was acutely conscious that Shivaji’s greatest strength lay
in his hill forts and treacherous terrain and that he was deploying the
Maratha guerrilla playbook devastatingly against his opponents. It was a
captivating contest between two superbly pitted rivals, Shivaji’s
insurrection growing in size even as Aurangzeb repeatedly applied an
incredible amount of pressure and the Mughals vastly outnumbered the
Marathas.
Broadly, Shivaji’s career had three stages. The first was from his childhood
until 1656, the first twenty-six years of his life. It was marked by his early
deeds as a rebel. The second phase covered the dramatic decade from 1656
to 1666. The battle of wits and the action during these ten thrilling years, as
Shivaji took on both Bijapur and Aurangzeb, were extraordinary. From time
to time, Shivaji suffered setbacks as the confrontation raged, and there were
points when he found himself staring at an abyss and things looked
hopeless for him. The manner in which he picked himself up and hit back at
both the Adil Shahi and the Mughals makes this decade one of the most
fascinating in the history of early modern India. The third phase from
1666, when Shivaji was thirty-six, until his death at the age of fifty in 1680
combined consolidation and expansion even as the conflict between
Shivaji and Aurangzeb played out relentlessly, capturing attention across
the length and breadth of India.
Shivaji was shrewd enough not to engage in pitched battles with his
enemies. This allowed him to calibrate his stand and take the measure of his
opponents before he made his responses. He also offered concessions to his
opponents and made retreats in order to give himself time to re-equip
himself and his forces and to make further gains on the ground. One of his
outstanding qualities as a military leader and statesman was that he was as
brilliantly adept at holding himself back as he was at launching the most
boldly daring and seemingly impossible of attacks.
Among the things that left Shivaji’s opponents flummoxed was the
steadfast loyalty of his lieutenants and followers, mostly people drawn from
ordinary families in the Deccan. One of his closest aides, Baji Prabhu
Deshpande, held off a major Bijapuri onslaught in 1660 in a narrow pass in
the mountains with a group of just 300 men to enable Shivaji to reach a
place of safety; in the process Baji Prabhu laid down his life, becoming a
legend in his own right.
In 1674, Shivaji took the momentous decision to crown himself sovereign,
a declaration of the establishment of his own independent state, and in
heraldic terms, the start of a new era. By giving his rule legal, official
status, he robbed Aurangzeb, Bijapur, Golconda or anybody else for that
matter of the opportunity of accusing him of overstepping the line. From
now on, he was going to deal with them all as an equal. He had pulled off
something that hardly anyone could match up to.
At the time of his death in 1680, when he was only fifty years old, Shivaji
had left for his successors such a wealth of inspiration that despite
Aurangzeb’s hurried march to the Deccan to recapture lost ground, they
succeeded in ensuring that the Mughal emperor stayed in the south and
could never go back to the north for a quarter of a century, up until his death
in 1707. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the rule of the Marathas
reached its apogee as they conquered the major part of the subcontinent,
their territory stretching from Attock in the north (in present-day Pakistan)
to Bengal in the east before the British came and took over.
One of Shivaji’s most remarkable achievements was the building of his own
naval fleet. He was alone among his contemporaries in recognizing the
importance of the seas and demonstrated a political and strategic vision in
this regard that all the other rulers sorely lacked. The foreign powers the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the French were reluctant to share
sea power with him. In fact, they often showed open hostility, and Shivaji
had to nuance his positions with them, alternating between demonstrating
his strength and opening negotiations. Shrewd general-statesman that he
was, he was as deeply wary of and sceptical about the firangs as he was
about all of his other adversaries. He remained constantly alert to their
shenanigans, took forceful, uncompromising and retaliatory actions where
necessary, and reminded them constantly that they would have to accept
things on his terms a quality that stands out given the rapaciousness,
especially of the British East India Company, that revealed itself later on
and proved costly to the people of the subcontinent.
If Shivaji improvised in war, he innovated in peace or whenever he got
some respite from warfare. Before he had turned twenty, he had started
resettling populations in and around Pune and in the Maval valleys of the
Sahyadri mountain ranges. He offered incentives for increase in cultivation
and for bringing wastelands under the plough. In the second half of the
1660s and the first half of the 1670s, he carefully reorganized the entire
civilian administration in his territories, which had by then grown
considerably in size. He took away a great deal of the powers of officials
who had hereditary grants to collect revenue and were in the habit of
extorting from the local population. This assault on the deeply entrenched
vested interests was extraordinary in its boldness because it placed the
political reorientation he was effecting at risk of disruption and sabotage at
all levels, but it endeared him to the people and showed him to be a fearless
pioneer.
Shivaji cared for his people. He strictly forbade his army from taking
anything from the lands and fields of ordinary peasants and farmers. Those
of his soldiers who flouted these rules and troubled the peasants and local
villagers were punished. Among his more notable written directives was
that not a blade of grass should be touched and no grain of food taken by
force. If the soldiers did that, he stated, the villagers would think of them as
worse than the Mughals, underlining the nature of the subjugation of the
people under Mughal rule.
Shivaji was a liberator. He came in as a breath of fresh air for people in the
Maratha country, who were not used to being treated with such respect by
their rulers. Having said that, it should also be underlined that he was a man
of his times. The revolution he achieved was brought about through armed
resistance and all the fiercely aggressive warfare methods that were de
rigueur in the seventeenth century: violent and debilitating attacks on
enemies; capture of embattlements, arms, ammunition and personnel;
despoilment of the adversary’s critical geographical areas; and infiltration
of enemy territory and plunder. The armed political revolution was in sync
with the martial combat techniques of the times.
As British rule in India spawned a new national consciousness in the
nineteenth century, leaders of the freedom movement began looking up to
Shivaji as a source of inspiration. His determination, his steely resolve, his
persistence, his overcoming of deadly difficulties, and his statesmanlike
qualities that enabled him to realize his goals were seen as traits to emulate.
The movement holding up Shivaji as a national icon for the unity of the
Indian people in their fight for political emancipation gained momentum
because he appealed both to the educated and the unlettered, the new elite
who had imbibed Western ideas of enlightenment and the masses who were
deeply traditionalist in thought and action. His rule was seen as reflecting
justice, equity and tolerance. Thus it was that among the earliest to hail
Shivaji as an exemplar was the Maharashtrian social reformer Gopal Hari
Deshmukh, a stern critic of orthodoxy and ritualism. In an article in 1848,
Deshmukh hailed Shivaji as a living legend.2 Deshmukh’s contemporary,
Jotirao Phule, who eventually got the title ‘Mahatma’, wrote a powada
(ballad) in Shivaji’s honour in 1869. Phule attacked Brahmins and
considered British rule a blessing because he believed it had ended
Brahminical orthodoxy. In his powada, which he said he was writing for the
so-called lower castes such as the Kunbis, Malis, Mahars, Matangs, Phule
said Shivaji was a great king because the rayats (peasants) were happy with
his rule, and he had framed new laws for them and taken care of the
ordinary people.3
Deshmukh’s writings resonated with the educated sections in western
India and Phule’s with ordinary farmers. Soon there emerged a brilliant
national leader who successfully enlisted the support of both the masses and
the elite in the name of Shivaji. That leader was Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
popularly known as Lokmanya. He launched in 1896 the annual Shivaji
festival on the Maratha hero’s birth anniversary, and it resonated through
the length and breadth of India. Tilak used Shivaji’s story to make his fiery
statement: ‘Swarajya is my birthright.’ In western India, people of different
intellectual persuasions were now citing Shivaji’s life and work: the scholar,
jurist and moderate M.G. Ranade, the radical young revolutionary V.D.
Savarkar, and the famous Marathi playwright Ram Ganesh Gadkari.
In Bengal, the Marathas had for long been seen as unwelcome invaders.
But Shivaji’s image, wedded to the national movement, brought about a
drastic revision of perception. This change was sparked off by the writer
Bhudev Mukhopadhyay as early as 1857, the year of the great revolt,
followed by the depiction of Shivaji by the nationalist R.C. Dutt as a
national hero.4 When Tilak launched a movement to repair Shivaji’s
memorial at Raigad in 1895, among those present on the dais to address the
gathering was Surendranath Banerjea, president of the Indian National
Congress and then the most popular leader of Bengal.5 In 1902, the
celebration of the Shivaji festival began in Bengal; two years later,
Rabindranath Tagore wrote a poem describing Shivaji as ‘the King of
Kings’; and the fire generated by the 1905 partition of Bengal saw to it that
the next year, the Shivaji festival was observed there in a way ‘hardly
surpassed in Maharashtra itself’.6 The nationalist leaders Bipin Chandra Pal
and Aurobindo Ghose, and the revolutionary journal Jugantar, among
others, interpreted Shivaji’s life and ideals for their fellow Bengalis;
Aurobindo in particular wrote a ballad for Shivaji’s warrior Baji Prabhu
Deshpande who had sacrificed his life to protect the Maratha leader, and a
poem, ‘Bhavani Mandir’, where, referring to Shivaji’s mother goddess
Bhavani (Durga), he wrote, ‘Chosen of Shivaji, Bhavani’s swords / For you
the Gods prepare.’7 The revolutionary Anushilan Samiti adopted Shivaji’s
war cry of Har Har Mahadev’. Comparing Shivaji with his
contemporaries, Tagore wrote that Shivaji’s movement was of greater
significance than that of the Sikhs because while the Sikhs, like the
Marathas, were full of valour, Shivaji had a well-conceived plan of building
up a nation.8
The first biography of Shivaji in Urdu was written by a leader from the
northern parts, the patriot Lala Lajpat Rai: he wrote his book in 1896, the
very year in which Tilak started the Shivaji movement in Maharashtra.9 Just
as in Bengal, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a series of
writings on Shivaji in Hindi in the United Provinces and in the Assamese
language in the north-east made fervent appeals to people to take up the
cause of political freedom. At the same time, Shivaji began to figure
prominently in more and more specimens of confiscated and proscribed
Indian literature, especially in Marathi and Bengali, with the result that he
increased in stature in the national imagination until Mahatma Gandhi’s
idea of non-violence came to dominate public consciousness.
However, such was Shivaji’s story and legend that even Gandhi
recognized his greatness. In many ways Shivaji was a product of his early
modern times, as we have noted, and his work had involved armed
hostilities throughout, as well as pillage and sackings. Most apostles of non-
violence in the independence movement acknowledged that in the medieval
to early modern era there was no other way to fight against unjust rulers
than armed resistance. And in post-Independence India, parties of almost
every kind of ideological leaning have tried to appropriate Shivaji. They
cite his ideas of political, civic and administrative reforms as models
worthy of adopting not literally, because times have changed and
monarchies have been replaced by a democracy but in terms of the
foundational concepts of justice and fairness underlining his vision and his
actions.
So what kind of state was Shivaji trying to establish? Was it a secular state,
as some have asserted, or was it Hindu, as some others have declared? Or
was it simply a Maratha empire? The answer I have arrived at is that Shivaji
was not out to establish a secular or non-religious kingdom, nor was he bent
on founding a Hindu theocratic state. He was establishing a Hindu polity
one that was broadly inclusive, tolerant and all-encompassing and at the
same time drank deep of the fountain of Hindu culture and civilization. His
deep sense of his own religion and its spirituality made him regard Hindus
and Muslims as equal, and he saw religious discrimination as abhorrent,
immoral and unacceptable. Shivaji recruited Muslims in his army, just as he
recruited Marathas and other Hindus, and two of his navy admirals, Darya
Sarang Ventjee and Daulat Khan, were Muhammadans. One of his bitterest
critics, the official Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan, who called him a ‘hell-
dog’, put it in writing that Shivaji had strictly instructed his soldiers to treat
with the greatest respect the Muslim holy book, the Quran, if they came
across it.
The element of Hindu identity, though, is inescapable in Shivaji’s life and
courses through his career right from the beginning. Evidently the Islamic
conquest of India, and of the Deccan in particular in the late thirteenth
century, had ramifications for the lives of the vast majority of the region’s
population. Shivaji noticed that despite the rise of the Marathas as
accomplished soldiers of rank, the highest military ranks were still denied
to them. The Adil Shahi, the dominant power in the western Deccan, had
been tolerant, even pluralistic, in the sixteenth century, but things had
changed in the seventeenth century. And once Aurangzeb sat on the Mughal
throne when Shivaji was in his twenties, the empire turned increasingly
hostile towards Hindus. From the 1660s onwards, Aurangzeb began a reign
of social and economic repression, making Hindus pay customs duties
which Muslims were exempted from paying, and ultimately imposing the
discriminatory jaziya tax on ‘unbelievers’, in response to which Shivaji
wrote his famous letter to the emperor. Renaming of places in the Deccan
by the Islamic powers was also rampant during this period; all seals of the
state and its officials were issued in Persian in contrast to the earlier
tradition of Hindu rajas, including those from the Deccan, to use either
Sanskrit or the local languages.10
Shivaji’s actions show he was responding to what he was seeing all around
him. His fathers and mothers own seals were in Persian. But Shivaji, at the
age of sixteen itself, chose Sanskrit as the language of his seal, making an
unequivocal statement in the Persianate Age. Many Deccani kings who
were Hindu among them Pratapa Rudra and Kapaya Nayaka had taken,
from the time of the Delhi Sultanate’s invasions from the north, the title of
Sultan for themselves. Shivaji took the title Chhatrapati after the word
chhatra’ of Hindu rajas of the past.
Tagore was thus accurate in saying in an article in the Modern Review in
1911 that Shivaji had ‘in his mind the ideal of setting up a Hindu Empire’,11
as did Tilak and B.C. Pal. Jawaharlal Nehru too accepted in his Discovery
of India that Shivaji ‘was the symbol of a resurgent Hindu nationalism’.12
But Shivaji’s Hindu state was for Hindus and non-Hindus alike and did not
conceive of any difference in treatment between the two.
There are, thus, two kinds of people who would not be able to term his
state as one after their own heart. One group would be those who believe in
discrimination and domination in the name of faith, and would like to
overstate Shivaji’s role as a protector of the faith. Shivaji did once issue an
order to his soldiers saying ‘cows and Brahmins’ should not be harmed, but
it is utterly reductive and misleading, and a case of reading history
backwards for the benefit of modern-day religious conservatives, to label
him ‘protector of cows and Brahmins’ for this reason.13 In his era, the
ritualistic and caste-based order was strong, and with cows and Brahmins
symbolizing such an order, he was sending out a reassuring message to the
larger, tradition-bound society. There’s nothing to suggest he attached any
special importance to these two categories. All the evidence is that he stood
by so-called Brahmins and non-Brahmins alike, as much for the Ramoshis
and other tribals who were among the guardians of his forts as for the
Marathas, Kayasthas, Kolis, Bhandaris and Muslims like his navy admiral
Daulat Khan who fought shoulder to shoulder with him.
The second set of people who cannot claim his state as their own are those
who see the affirmation of Indian civilization in the denial of the terms
‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’; this group attempts to stall any discussion and
dialogue on the likely trauma that Islamic conquest over a period of several
centuries caused to Hindu cultural identity, despite the element of
syncretism that may have existed parallelly, and also seeks to excuse the
undeniable religious dimension of the attacks on Hindu temples by framing
them as mere assaults on seats of power.14
The term ‘Hindawi’ was current during Shivaji’s times in the Deccan, and
it indicated the vast majority of the land’s Hindu population, its diverse
tribal population, and indeed, all the indigenous peoples.15 It included,
interestingly and increasingly over time, the majority of Deccani Muslims
who, having entered over the seas through the western coast centuries ago,
had been absorbed as one with the land and had made the land their own
as against those coming in more recently from the northern parts who were
seen as being imbued with a different set of values.
What of the ‘Maharashtra dharma’ then, which has been named in some of
the poetic verses of the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Lord
Ram-worshipping saint Ramdas, as denoting Shivaji’s state? Is it evidence
of a Maratha state? Shivaji’s state was of course a Maratha state. Deeply
and profoundly so. His self-respecting Maratha mother Jijabai gave him
spine and spirituality; his father Shahaji and the Bhosle family as a whole,
with its military feats, awakened him to his potential; the hardiness and
dedication of his fellow Marathas and the resilience of the native Kunbis
and other peasants that Phule spoke about were the sinews of his power;
and the deeply humanistic philosophy of the Maharashtrian bhakti saint-
poets, from Namdeo and Dynaneshwar to Tukaram, lay at the core of his
worldview.
The reference to ‘Maharashtra dharma’ by Ramdas, an unstinting admirer
of Shivaji, points to a set of ethical, spiritual and cultural values and
principles of the Marathi-speaking regions, which were all part of a broader
Hindu identity. The stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata which
Shivaji’s mother told him constituted the same cultural heritage, as did the
ochre flag he selected for himself and the Maratha war cry of Har Har
Mahadev’ in the name of Lord Shiva. The fundamentally Maharashtrian
and macro Hindu civilizational identity are not unreconciled here; in fact,
they are truly culturally united. If that were not the case, Shivaji would not
have asked Chhatrasal, a youngster of the Bundela clan in the north, who
approached him seeking to join his army in the early 1670s, to head home
instead and set up a state of his own against the Mughals and against
Aurangzeb.16
In the final phase of his life in the second half of the 1670s, Shivaji’s
campaign of conquest covered large parts of present-day Telangana,
Andhra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. This is yet another sign that his
political dream was not restricted to the Marathi-speaking regions, though
Maharashtra would always be the nucleus and the heart. The ‘what ifs’ of
history are tantalizing. Shivaji died in 1680, having marched all the way up
to the eastern coast. What more lands would he have conquered and
administered is something we can only guess. But his successors among the
Marathas did not restrict themselves to Maharashtra either; they ventured
deep into the northern and eastern parts of Hindustan.
In writing this biography of Shivaji, I had to sift through a vast collection of
papers, documents and books in the Marathi language. The majority of the
Marathas’ own records were burnt during enemy assaults or destroyed by
the Marathas themselves after Shivaji’s death as their conflict with the
Mughals intensified and as the Mughals under Aurangzeb took Raigad and
other important forts, where the top official documents were stored.
Whatever family papers still survived in the homes of a few Marathas were
hidden by them after the end of the Peshwa era in 1818 for fear of the new
British rulers cracking down on them on suspicion of an anti-British
conspiracy by those still owing their allegiance to the Maratha rulers. The
British brazenly confiscated the records they found, not allowing the public
any access to them.
But slowly, as national consciousness grew in the late nineteenth century,
an archival movement of sorts developed in western India, with its
proponents urging families to hand over documents to historians who could
preserve and examine them and simultaneously appealing to the British Raj
to open up the archives they had concealed. The efforts bore fruit. The
pioneering Maratha historian who led the archival movement was V.K.
Rajwade. He painstakingly collected, at the turn of the century, twenty-one
volumes of documents, chiefly private papers of Maratha families and
official state correspondence in the nature of orders or revenue
arrangements. These are indeed priceless for any historian, and so they
proved for me in the research, as did the materials put together by
generations of scholars of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal of Pune
like B.G. Paranjpe, D.B. Parasnis, K.N. Sane, K.V. Purandare, D.V. Apte,
D.V. Kale and G.S. Sardesai. Sardesai’s eight volumes of Marathi Riyasat
provide an encyclopaedic view of Maratha history and of the long Maratha–
Mughal conflict. During his time broadly the first half of the twentieth
century – not only scholars writing in Marathi such as T.S. Shejwalkar, K.V.
Keluskar and V.S. Bendrey but also those writing in English apart from
Sardesai himself such as Jadunath Sarkar, M.G. Ranade, K.T. Telang, Bal
Krishna, Surendra Nath Sen, C.V. Vaidya and H.G. Rawlinson – contributed
handsomely to exploring Shivaji’s life and times. Five modern-day
historians stand out as their heirs G.H. Khare, Setumadhavrao Pagadi,
Narhar Kurundkar, A.N. Kulkarni and G.B. Mehendale (who wrote in both
English and Marathi) for their work looked at new discoveries and
findings and interpreted them for the present generation. Yet most of their
writings remain accessible largely to scholars of history. It is with a deep
dept of gratitude that I have referenced them extensively in this book so that
they can reach the twenty-first century reader curious to know and learn
about Shivaji.
The English works on Shivaji in particular, most of them published in the
first half of the twentieth century, suffer from a surfeit of outdated material.
Jadunath Sarkars book Shivaji and His Times is a case in point. For
decades it was regarded as the standard English work on Shivaji. Sarkar,
unfortunately, got several things wrong, most of which Marathi historians
subsequently either pointed out or corrected with corroborative evidence.
To give an example, Sarkar wrote that Shivaji had renamed the Kondhana
fort as Sinhagad after one of his closest lieutenants, Tanaji Malusare, was
slain there during a spectacular assault on the Mughal garrison in 1670 and
said, Gad aala, pan Sinha gela(The fort’s won, but the lion’s dead). The
legend made its way into textbooks and in the popular imagination in
Maharashtra and has been repeated endlessly, in ballads, cinema and the
theatre. The truth, though, is that Kondhana was always called by its other
name of Sinhagad, and there are letters extant from before Tanaji’s death
that mention the name. It was precisely because it was called Sinhagad that
Shivaji used the lion metaphor and not the other way round. This book
looks at this myth and several other stories that have acquired popular and
legendary status, but it separates fact from fiction and presents the real
Shivaji of history, whose life is so filled with drama that it scarcely requires
further embellishment in the form of made-up tales.
Sarkar and most other English biographers of Shivaji, including the British
official Dennis Kincaid, also almost totally neglected two crucial
contemporary works on Shivaji’s life. These works are by Shivaji’s officials
and chroniclers Parmanand, who wrote Shivabharat, and Sabhasad, who
wrote Sabhasad Bakhar. Their writings throw considerable light on
Shivaji’s life. The exact words that a recent biographer of Thomas
Cromwell used about his close contemporaries writing about him can be
applied to Parmanand and Sabhasad: ‘We need to remember that they
were there,’ and ‘we need to respect their observations and comprehend
their limitations and concerns.’17 The overlooking of their texts has
seriously hindered writings on Shivaji’s life in English, and one of my aims
in this book is to reinstate their works in his narrative.
I cannot read Persian, but translations of Persian works and official
documents and records of the Mughals, of the Nizam Shahi of Ahmadnagar,
of Bijapur and of Golconda by Sarkar, G.H. Khare, Pagadi and so many
others helped me to record the point of view of Shivaji’s adversaries and to
understand how they perceived him and changed their perceptions of him
and responses to him over time. Sarkars translation of documents in the
Rajasthan archives helped to illumine elements of Shivaji’s visit to Agra,
his imprisonment and his escape. The officials of the British East India
Company wrote copiously about their activities all across peninsular India
in the seventeenth century, and they recorded lots of details about Shivaji
and his actions, including his two raids on Surat. I have critically examined
their records for those details and for their sometimes adversarial and
sometimes transactional perspective. Similarly, records of the Portuguese
rulers of Goa and their officials, translated from the original by the scholar
P.S. Pissurlencar, and the diaries of the French official of Pondicherry
Francois Martin at the time of Shivaji’s southern campaign of the late 1670s
provided rare and rarely quoted accounts of Shivaji.
Interestingly, the first foreign biographer of Shivaji was a Portuguese man
based in Marmugao in Goa during his lifetime, Cosme da Guarda. Though
his biography was published in 1695, that is, fifteen years after Shivaji’s
death, da Guarda had spoken to many people in the Deccan before writing
it, and it provides interesting insights into how Shivaji was seen by the
people of the region during that time and of contemporary discussions
around his personality, politics and his momentous clash with Aurangzeb.
The Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci was part of the Mughal army and
had the opportunity to meet Shivaji and have conversations with him. He
recorded much material in his diaries which I have consulted and, where
relevant, quoted. Other European travellers and officials such as Francois
Bernier, Jean de Thevenot and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier also left accounts, in
the classic European style of documenting most of what they were
observing around them. Their observations came in handy at times where
the account was plausible and the evidence supportive; their flights of
fancy, as indeed those of all the others, Sabhasad and Parmanand included, I
have roundly rejected.
Shivaji Maharaj as Chhatrapati marked a point of serious departure in the
politics and military history of early modern India, a point that needs close
examination in order to understand the picture that emerged later in the
subcontinent. His life was an expression of popular will and an eloquent
demonstration of political will. He gave himself up to the task of fusing his
people into a nation, with a sense of mission, and thwarted Aurangzeb’s
ambition of conquering all of Hindustan. The spirit Shivaji was imbued
with endured after his death, and his motivations for state-building still
constitute a template for Indians in the twenty-first century. This book
places him on the stage of the seventeenth century as the leading actor that
he was and charts his journey, at times from truly serious failure to dazzling
success, but – to paraphrase what Aurobindo Ghose once wrote about him18
always ultimately in the direction of undermining a vast empire and
creating a political entity whose values still haven’t been extinguished.
Robert Orme (1782), quoted in Dennis Kincaid, The Grand Rebel (Rupa Publications, 2020 edition),
264.
Anil Samarth, Shivaji and the Indian National Movement (Somaiya Publications, 1975), 7–11. The
information and quotations in this segment are from Samarth’s book.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 59–61.
Ibid., 62–63.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 98.
Gajanan Bhaskar Mehendale, Shivaji: His Life and Times (Param Mitra Publications, 2011), 133–
134.
Anil Samarth, Shivaji and the Indian National Movement (Somaiya Publications, 1975), 89.
Ibid.
Surendra Nath Sen, Life of Siva Chhatrapati: Being a translation of the Sabhasad Bakhar, Extracts
and Documents Relating to Maratha History, Volume 1 (University of Calcutta, 1920), 32.
As for the argument that the term Hindu was practically non-existent before the twentieth century,
Upinder Singh (the scholar-daughter of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh), has written about
how the river Indus or Sindhu gave rise to the terms ‘India’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindustan’, with ancient
Chinese sources referring to the land of ‘Shen-tu’, Greek texts referencing ‘India’, and Persian
inscriptions describing ‘Hidu’ as one of the subject countries of the Achaemenid ruler Darius. While
Megasthenes, who came to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in the fourth century ce, looked at the
entire subcontinent as ‘India’, later Persian texts used ‘Hindustan’ for the land and ‘Hindu’ for its
inhabitants. Thus the cultural identity is a rather old one. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and
Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century (Pearson, 2009), 3.
Hindawi started out in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a language that ‘moved away from
Persian’. Gradually, the term began to indicate the indigenous people of India. Setumadhavrao
Pagadi, Shivaji, (National Book Trust, 1983), 98; Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation:
Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward (Westland, 2021), 194.
This account of Chhatrasal was penned by his court poet Gore Lal, better known as ‘Lal Kavi’. The
official account written in verse, ‘Chhatra Prakash’, covers events till 1707. Quoted in G.S.
Sardesai, Shivaji Souvenir (Keshav Bhikaji Dhawale, 1927),154–160, published as part of
Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, ed. B.K. Apte (Bombay
University, 1975), 141–144.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell (Penguin Books, 2019), 4.
Aurobindo Ghose published what he called an imaginary dialogue between Shivaji and the Rajput
general Jai Singh, whom Aurangzeb had sent to the Deccan to subdue Shivaji. In the conversation,
Aurobindo quoted Jai Singh as saying to Shivaji, ‘Where is the seal upon your work, the pledge of
His (God’s) authority?’ To this, Shivaji replies, ‘I undermined an Empire and it has not been rebuilt.
I created a nation and it has not yet perished.’ Aurobindo Ghose, Karmayogin, Vol. 3 (Sri
Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, [1910] 1972), 483–485, quoted in Samarth, Shivaji and the
Indian National Movement, 148.
OceanofPDF.com
1
A Child of the Deccan
It was Friday, and the sun had already set behind the mountains surrounding
the steep, craggy hill of Shivneri. These peaks lay at the northern end of the
long Sahyadri range, which vertically divided the Marathi-speaking regions
of western India into two distinct halves: one stretched up to the Arabian
Sea some 40 kilometres away, and the other was a land of chasms and
crevasses sloping down to arid plains that somehow fused together into a
triangle, one as rough-hewn and ragged as the heights above. Atop the
Shivneri hill was an eponymous fort, located a forbidding 3,500 feet above
sea level. It was a sanctuary of sorts, towering above Maratha lands riddled
with conflicts between four competing kingdoms, and that was why Jijabai,
the pregnant wife of Shahaji Raje Bhosle, had sheltered there as she awaited
the birth of their child.
The child was born that very evening, on 19 February 1630. He was
named Shivaji. Three centuries later, scholars and politicians would still be
sparring over the date of his birth, and committees would discuss whether it
was 27 April 1627 or 19 February 1630. A credible account, penned by the
Marathi poet Parmanand on the orders of the Chhatrapati himself, cites
Falgun Vadya Tritiya 1551 according to the Hindu calendar, which
corresponds to 19 February 1630. This is confirmed by the Jedhe Shakavali
or Jedhe Chronology, a contemporary account of a family aligned to
Shivaji, as well as an inscription in Thanjavur and three horoscopes of
Shivaji found in Rajasthan. The sources which mention 27 April 1627 are
chiefly those recorded over a hundred years after he had passed on.
Why has this controversy carried on for so long? It has much to do with
the turbulent history of the region and Shivaji’s emergence as a historical,
political and quasi-religious figure. As stated earlier, most Maratha records
of his times were destroyed during the Mughal–Maratha conflict in the
Deccan a corruption of the Sanskrit word dakshin meaning ‘south’ in
the wake of his death. Those that remained were mainly family histories
and letters related to land grants and other administrative matters.
Gradually, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians in
India began to gather the documents that were still around, and the first date
to emerge was the 1627 one. As Shivaji developed into an icon during the
Indian freedom movement, this year came to be established in popular and
cultural memory as Shivaji’s birth year. Shivaji Jayanti was started and
popularized by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. As more accurate documents emerged
the Jedhe Shakavali was brought to light by Tilak himself in 1916 it
became clear 1630 was the right date. But historians and others who had
made the claim for 1627 would not give up, which is why confusion still
exists.
Going back to that rugged hilltop in Shivneri: how was the new baby
welcomed? If you believe the hugely popular, Broadway-meets-Bollywood
Marathi theatre production on Chhatrapati Shivaji’s life that has been
running to packed houses since the early 1990s, Shivaji’s birth is announced
by a woman who comes running out of Shivneri fort breathless with
excitement and exclaims Mulga! Mulga! Mulga! (It’s a boy! It’s a boy!
It’s a boy!). She’s followed by an enthusiastic bunch of Marathas sounding
their tutari, a traditional trumpet-like instrument, hurling gulal or
celebratory colours in the air, daubing the stuff on each others cheeks, and
waving the ochre Maratha flag while sweets are distributed liberally.
Mounted on a lavish scale, this play, written, produced and presented by a
famous balladeer,1 is sometimes performed on a stage so broad and wide
that mahout-controlled elephants walk from end to end, imperiously, and
horses stride across in beautifully choreographed scenes. Stirring stuff for
playgoers, who already know what the boy is going to do when he grows
up, but actually quite far-fetched. The fort was chosen by Shahaji, a
Maratha nobleman doing his duty on the battlefield at the moment of his
son’s birth, to keep his wife who had lost other babies safe in an
atmosphere of precarity and peril. Given that, boisterous revelry would
have been out of the question. More likely, the expressions of joy were
subdued.
Jijabai and Shahaji had had five children before Shivaji, all sons. Only
one, Sambhaji, born circa 1620, had survived. They had arranged his
marriage, two years before Shivaji’s birth, at the same fort where the sixth
child had now arrived. The names of Shivaji’s other four siblings were
never recorded. They likely died in infancy. Naturally, the parents were
anxious that the newborn should survive. To their great relief, he did;
Sambhaji, though, died in a battle in Kanakgiri in Karnataka, in his thirties.
Three years after Sambhaji’s death, Shivaji would give his own firstborn his
brothers name.
A common theory around Shivaji’s name, mentioned in the latter-day and
highly unreliable Chitnis Chronicle,2 is that it comes from the Hindu
goddess Shivai, whose idol stood in a temple on Shivneri fort. But in his
record of Shivaji’s life, the poet Parmanand states simply that he was named
‘Shiv’ because he was born at ‘Shivgiri’ or Shivneri fort.3 There’s little to
show that the fort itself was named after the goddess; it’s possible the name
of the fort came first and the temple deity’s name was derived from that.
However, it’s plausible that ‘Shiv’, ‘Shivneri’ and ‘Shivaji’ all have their
origins in the name of one of Hinduism’s most powerful deities. The Bhosle
family, we know from records, was devoted to Lord Shiva. Besides,
Bhimashankar, one of Shiva’s jyotirlingas the twelve spots across India
where he, according to legend, cast his celestial beam is not far to the
south-west of Shivneri.
Whatever the provenance of Shivaji’s name, Shivneri was nevertheless an
appropriate setting for his birth given his lineage on both sides. The Bhosles
claimed descent from the Sisodia clan of Rajasthan, which was of noble
extraction, but the earliest specific location they’re traced to, sometime
around the middle of the sixteenth century, is Verul or Ellora. Home to
some of the most magnificent rock-cut Hindu, Buddhist and Jain caves in
the world and now recognized by UNESCO as a global heritage site, Ellora
was held by Shivaji’s ancestors as one of their hereditary tracts of land. Cut
into the Shivneri hill, too, on three sides, are nearly sixty rock caves,
nowhere near as extraordinary as those of Ellora and quite devoid of
ornamentation, but significant nonetheless for their two chaityas or prayer
halls, several quadrangular viharas or cave homes for itinerant monks,
some open cells and chambers, a few small halls with benches running
along their side walls, a few roof paintings, nine inscriptions and a number
of cisterns. Jijabai’s father was Lukhji Jadhavrao from the Jadhav clan,
‘Rao’ being an honorific. What is Jadhav in Marathi is Yadava in Hindi: the
Jadhavs were genealogically linked to the Yadavas, a Hindu dynasty that
ruled over considerable parts of the Deccan between the twelfth and
fourteenth centuries CE. The town of Junnar (the northernmost town in Pune
district) and four hills around it with their individual cave groups the
Shivneri hill on the town’s south-west, the Tulja hill to the west, the Ganesh
hill to the north, and Manmodi to the south4 – once belonged to the Jadhavs.
The Bhosles were Marathas, and so were the Jadhavs. For centuries, the
term ‘Maratha’ denoted a resident of the Marathi-speaking parts. A fifth
century CE. Sinhalese document described a region as ‘Maharattha,’ the
eleventh-century Islamic chronicler Al Baruni called the place south of the
Narmada ‘Marhat Des,’ and the fourteenth-century Muslim writer Ibn
Batuta stated those living around Daulatabad were ‘Marathas’.5 In the
fifteenth and sixteenth century, people from the Marathi-speaking regions
who entered military service and obtained positions came to be identified as
Marathas. In time, the Marathas, because of their military tradition,
developed, like the Rajputs, as a distinct social group, differentiating
themselves from others. Broadly, the entire Maharashtrian community has
been referred to as Maratha across India for generations; in this book, the
word will denote the wider community except when referring to the
distinctive group called the Marathas.
Their positions were all held in the Islamic kingdoms of the Deccan, best
defined, in the context of the Middle Ages, as that part of the Indian land
mass south of the Vindhya mountains. Maharashtra was a part of the
Deccan region.6 It chiefly comprised three parts: sections of the Konkan or
western coastline where Marathi was the chief language, the Ghats and the
Desh.7 The Ghats were mountains that rose over 40 kilometres inland from
the coastline and successfully blocked the monsoon clouds coming in from
the south-west, keeping the hills rocky, dry and not very conducive to
cultivation. The Desh was the plateau that began where the Ghats ended and
got narrower as you went further east. One part of the Desh, which lay in
the shadow of the mountains, was similar in nature to the dry and the
largely farm-resistant areas along the heights; the other part was productive,
helped along considerably by three rivers that ran along its length before
moving from the Marathi parts to the east: the Tapi or Purna to the north,
the Godavari roughly at the centre, and the Bhima–Krishna to the south.
The rivers were life givers and some of the most ancient dwellings came up
around them, including the famous pilgrim centre of Pandharpur on the
banks of the Bhima.
The local population, who grew ‘mainly wheat, cotton and pulses and very
little rice’,8 impressed the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan
Tsang, who has provided one of the earliest descriptions of the region:
Men are fond of learning and studying both heretical and orthodox books. The disposition of the
people is honest and simple; they are tall in stature and of a stern character. To their
benefactors, they are grateful; to their enemies, relentless. If they are insulted, they will risk their
lives to avenge themselves. If they are asked to help one in distress, they will forget themselves in
their haste to render assistance.9
The language of the locals was known as Maharashtri ‘from
Maharashtra’ at least from the third century CE. Maharashtri was the
Prakrit or vernacular child of Sanskrit. One of the oldest surviving
anthologies of poetry from South Asia, the Gathasaptasati (‘700 verses in
gatha form’), was compiled in Maharashtri Prakrit around the second
century CE by a Satavahana king and has 700 verses, almost all of them
about love. According to the scholar Martha Ann Selby, Prakrit
grammarians considered Maharashtri ‘the Prakrit par excellence’,10 and the
Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (fourth to fifth centuries CE) used Maharashtri in his
dramas, getting female characters to speak verses in the language.11
In time Maharashtri became Marathi, and from the eighth to the thirteenth
centuries it grew further. The precocious sixteen-year-old Dynaneshwar
wrote his famous commentary on the Bhagavad Gita at the end of the
thirteenth century and a Hindu religious ferment in the form of the bhakti or
devotional movement overtook the land, rising in opposition to ritualism,
orthodoxy and caste oppression. The bhakti movement ran almost parallel
to the entry and establishment of Islam in the Deccan, and in part may have
been a response to the decline in superiority of the Hindu faith, decaying
under the burden of dead ritual.
The Marathas rose in military service in the sixteenth century, by which
time the Deccan had been completely overrun by Islamic kingdoms. The
first Muslim invasion of the region was led by the Delhi sultan’s nephew
Ala-ud-din Khilji in 1296. Until then, all Muslim invasions had been
limited to the northern parts, and the Deccan had four regional Hindu
kingdoms roughly formed along linguistic lines: the Yadavas with their
capital at Devagiri in the Marathi-speaking western Deccan, the Kakatiyas
in the Telugu-speaking Andhras, the Hoysalas of Karnataka, and the
Pandyas of Tamil country.
Khilji’s assault on Devagiri, and the riches he took from that capital of the
Yadavas, helped to cement his claim on the Delhi throne. The Tughluq
dynasty, which succeeded the Khiljis, also took Devagiri in 1327. The
assaults of the Ghaznavids on Delhi in the tenth and eleventh centuries and
the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 had already led to the
influx of military and administrative personnel from Central Asia. With
Devagiri now taken by Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, renamed
Daulatabad and given the status of a second capital, one-tenth of Delhi’s
Muslim population was moved there. The Marathas were until this point not
known to be engaged in military activities, preferring instead to be tillers of
their lands. Using Daulatabad, situated 13 kilometres north-west of Khadki
(latter-day Aurangabad in the Marathwada plains) as a base, the Tughluqs
swooped down on Warangal in the eastern Deccan and destroyed the regime
of the Kakatiyas there, razing the big Swayambhu Shiva temple near the
fort, renaming the place Sultanpur, and forcing the local raja to climb up the
ramparts of his fort and genuflect in the direction of Delhi.12 Eventually, the
four Hindu kingdoms were wiped out, and the rule of the Tughluqs, too,
ended soon afterwards as a result of twin rebellions. In its place emerged,
by the middle of the fourteenth century, two successor states: the Bahmani
Sultanate and the Vijayanagara kingdom.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, three momentous changes
occurred on the South Asian landscape: Babur, a descendant of Genghis
Khan the Mongol and also of Timur the Turk, founded the Mughal empire
in the north; the Portuguese captured Goa on the western coast; and the
Bahmani kingdom of the Deccan, after about 150 years, splintered into the
five separate states of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Bidar, Berar and Golconda.
Though opposed to each other, four of these kingdoms got together to crush
the already weakened state of Vijayanagara at the battle of Talikota in 1565.
It was under these four kingdoms that the Marathas sought military
service, and their rise as competent soldiers was the result of four factors.
The first was that tensions were always running high between the Arab-
Turkish Muslims or ‘Afagis’ coming in from the north, the so-called
‘Westerners’ arriving on ships from the Persian Gulf, and the Deccanis,
who by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw themselves as
indigenous Muslims. These constant tensions made the Deccan sultanates
look to the local Marathi-speaking population for recruits.
One of the sultans was particularly welcoming of the Marathas and their
language. Ibrahim Adil Shah I, who came to power in 1535, sacked the
majority of his Persian-origin troops, mostly Shias from Iran, and recruited
Deccani Muslims in their place. And to check the power of these ‘Deccanis’
and the ‘Afagis’, he chose the Marathas for his troops. Adil Shah I also
decided to get public accounts of his kingdom recorded in the native
Marathi and Kannada instead of Persian, which was the language used
before him.13 The second reason for the rise of the Marathas was their close
links with the native populace, which helped the sultanates most of whom
were Shias as distinct from the Sunnis ruling the north – to establish a direct
connection with the people of the region, consolidate their rule and get a
grip on administration right down to the village level. The third was the
drying up of ‘Turkish’ and other Muslim recruits coming in from the north
from the time the Mughal empire began to expand southwards; it was
mostly the Mughals that the Muslims entering from Central Asia or the
Persian Gulf would increasingly serve. And the fourth was the easy and
swift manner in which the Marathas took to cavalry and other soldierly
duties.
Among the Maratha families whose members became prominent nobles in
the Deccani kingdoms during this period were the Bhosles and the Jadhavs.
In addition to the family base of Ellora, the Bhosles, in time, gained
Chamargunda near Ahmadnagar and Pune as their jagirs. A jagir was an
area where the jagirdar or holder of the jagir, while professing loyalty to a
particular kingdom, maintained a body of troops under him for military
service, held forts for a kingdom, and enjoyed land assessment rights.
Allegiances were fluid as battles for territory were almost unceasing, and a
jagirdar often attached himself to the state that had either in keeping with
or against his will his jagir under its control. These jagirs were
transferable, so a fief holder often preferred to keep his jagir rather than his
fealty to a particular state in case his area was seized by a rival kingdom.
Shivaji’s grandfather Maloji acquired prominence as a noble with the
Nizam Shahi kingdom, which controlled most of the north and north-west
parts of the upper Deccan. He served the kingdom particularly well under
Malik Ambar, the Ethiopian regent of the Nizam Shahi state who put up a
strong defence of the northern Deccan from 1600 until his death in 1626. In
pushing back the forces dispatched, first, by Emperor Akbar to conquer the
Deccan in 1600 and right through the reign of Jahangir, who continued the
assault on the borders of the Nizam Shahi kingdom until his death in 1627,
Ambar excelled in his role and was smartly assisted by the Maratha forces
under his command. Ambar became known for his deployment of Marathas
and his faith in their abilities, and was the first to use bargir-giri or guerrilla
warfare to deadly effect with the help of the terrain-knowing Marathas.
After Maloji, Shahaji carried forward the martial tradition of the family
and became one of the Nizam Shahi’s leading chieftains, distinguishing
himself in the battle of Bhatvadi of 1624 in which Malik Ambars men held
off the combined forces of the Mughals and the Adil Shah 16 kilometres to
the east of Ahmadnagar.14 It was after the death of Malik Ambar that
Shahaji played a truly starring role in the kingdom’s affairs. While he too,
like the other Maratha sardars, had in the past switched sides and worked
with the Mughals and the Adil Shah, from 1633 to 1636 he single-handedly
held the Nizam Shahi banner aloft and kept the state afloat, anointing just
like Ambar had done before him a young scion of the Nizam Shah’s
family. Though the Mughals pressed down undeterred on a kingdom
considerably weakened, Shahaji, leading a band of 12,000 troops (5,000
directly under him and the rest of the Nizam Shahi state), at one point
succeeded in capturing Nasik and Trimbak in the north, Sangamner and
Junnar in the central parts, and sizeable chunks of ‘Tal’ Konkan or the
southern end of the Marathi-speaking Konkan.15 The Mughals nevertheless
crushed the Nizam Shahi Sultanate finally in 1636. Crucially, among the
empire’s commanders in the Deccan who led the campaign against Shahaji
in this last phase of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate was Shaista Khan,16 who
would later become one of the major opponents of Shivaji. After the Nizam
Shahi’s collapse, Shahaji took up service with the Adil Shahi of Bijapur.
Jijabai’s family, the Jadhavs, were deshmukhs or headmen of a pargana (a
group of anything between twenty and hundred villages, akin to a modern
district or subdistrict) in Sindkhed, not too far to the east of Ellora, so the
two families were known to each other. Jijabai’s father, Lukhji Jadhavrao,
was a noble of eminence and much sought after by both the Nizam Shahi
and the Mughals, evident from the fact that he shifted allegiance from one
to the other seven times in a fifteen-year period between 1614 and 1629.17
In his memoirs, Jahangir wrote of a battle against Malik Ambars forces in
1616, where, just before hostilities began, ‘Jado Ray’ (Jadhavrao) was
among the ‘influential leaders’ of the ‘Bargis’ (Marathas) who defected to
the Mughal side along with his body of troops.18 The ‘Bargis’, Jahangir
noted, were ‘a hardy lot’ and ‘a centre of resistance in that (Deccan)
country’.19 A representative of the British East India Company at
Burhanpur, Nicholas Bangham, said in his report to the English factory at
Surat, on 18 November 1621, that the latest from the court of Prince Shah
Jahan was that ‘Jaddoo Raye [Jadhavrao], one of the principall generalls of
the Decanns, is revolted and receaved at this court with great honour’.20
And the Adil Shahi kingdom’s chronicler of the period mentioned both
Jadhavrao and his son-in-law Shahaji Bhosle calling them ‘Jadav Rao’
and ‘Shahjiu Bhosle’ respectively as among the Maratha leaders in two
campaigns, one in 1614 and the other ten years later.21
Their families were well matched in terms of social class in a medieval to
early modern age set-up. Shahaji was married to Jijabai when he, as a
teenager, ‘had just about sprouted a moustache’ in the early teens of the
seventeenth century. ‘Jijau’, as the girl was called lovingly by her parents,
was five to seven years younger to him. Parmanand described the young
Jijabai at the time of her wedding as ‘well-born’ and ‘lotus-eyed’, ‘with
radiant black hairand ‘a visage so soft it looked like a blossomed lotus’.
Shahaji, he wrote, was ‘generous, humane, spirited, well-skilled in fighting,
endowed with all excellent qualities’.22
Some years after the marriage, ties between the Bhosles and the Jadhavs
were seriously fractured. One day, so the story goes, the Nizam Shah’s
sardars, including Jadhavrao, Shahaji and others had gathered in his durbar.
After the sultan withdrew, they were all on their way out when, at the exit to
the palace, they heard a commotion. An elephant of a sardar named
Khandagle had run amok. The elephant injured some members of Lukhji
Jadhav’s contingent, prompting Lukhji’s son and Jijabai’s brother, Dattaji,
to try and rein the wild animal in. Possibly interpreting Dattaji’s move as an
attack on the Sultanate, Shahaji and his cousins rushed to the elephant
owners rescue, and there was a major clash in which Dattaji was killed by
one of Shahaji’s cousins, Sambhaji.23 In turn the angry Jadhavs killed
Sambhaji, and Shahaji himself injured his arm in the melee. Finally the
sultan had to step in to end the fight. With one member of each family
killed, much bad blood was created. Jijabai must have been completely
torn, mourning the pointless death of a brother, and on the other hand,
witnessing her husband’s agony at the equally pointless death of his
cousin.24
Believing that the sultan had favoured the Bhosles in this incident, which
took place circa 1623, Lukhji Jadhav made one of his famous defections to
the Mughal side. When he was back later with the Nizam Shahi, a much
greater shock awaited him. Sometime in June–July 1629, information
trickled in that the new Mughal ruler, Shah Jahan, was soon going to launch
a campaign in the Deccan. Suspecting that Lukhji Jadhav was among the
generals planning to switch over, the Nizam Shah summoned him to his
durbar in Daulatabad. The moment he entered the durbar with his sons on
25 July, Lukhji was suddenly set upon and murdered by assailants who had
got the sultan’s go-ahead. Three of his sons Raghav, Achloji and
Yashwant were also killed in cold blood.25 Lukhji’s wife and Jijabai’s
mother, Girjai, had accompanied him to Daulatabad. She, along with her
surviving son Bahadur and Lukhji’s brother Jagdevrao, immediately left the
camp in which she was staying and headed to the family fiefdom of
Sindkhed for safety. The Jadhavs soon switched loyalties to the Mughals,
and revolted by the murders, Shahaji too went over to the Mughal camp,
despite the previous cooling-off with his in-laws’ family. Thus it was that at
the time of Shivaji’s birth, Shahaji was with the Mughals (he would leave in
1632 to try and save the Nizam Shah’s state).26 He held land rights in the
Pune and Chakan areas, but the Nizam Shahi didn’t hurry to take back those
lands; the Adil Shahi did, and he had to fight his fight. While he was doing
so, Jijabai was ensconced at Shivneri fort in Junnar district, which was near
Pune.
Shivneri was then under a Maratha sardar called Shriniwas Vishwasrao.
Shahaji and Jijabai had arranged the marriage of their son Sambhaji
sometime in 1628–29 to Jayanti, the daughter of this sardar. A pregnant
Jijabai would be safest with Sambhaji’s in-laws, Shahaji felt,27 and ‘with the
permission of his relative [Vishwasrao]’ left her ‘at Shivneri fort itself,
together with her attendants’.28 Far from enjoying noisy celebrations at the
time of Shivaji’s birth, Jijabai, sheltering in a home that was neither her
own nor that of her parents, would have had to keep a low profile. To make
matters worse, the Deccan was hit by a terrible famine from 1629 to 1631.
The Badshah Nama, the account of the first two decades of Shah Jahan’s
reign, said of the year 1630:
A total want in the Dakhin and Gujarat. The inhabitants were reduced to the direst extremity.
Life was offered for a loaf, but none would buy; rank was to be sold for a cake, but none cared for
it … The numbers of the dying caused obstructions in the roads.29
Shivaji spent the first six years of his life with his mother Jijabai at
Shivneri. Shahaji was in and out of the place, first fighting for the Mughals
in the Deccan and then attempting to shore up the flagging fortunes of the
Nizam Shahi. When Shivaji was born, Shahaji was in the midst of a conflict
with one Darya Khan at Nevasa near Gujarat. He first set eyes on his son
after the twin rituals of the boy’s annaprashan (the first time a baby is fed
food) and suryadarshan (the infant’s sighting of the sun) had been carried
out; this means, going by the usual timing of such ceremonies, that the
father beheld the son well over a month after his birth.30 Soon the little one
was moving about on all fours, playfully ‘chasing his own shadow in the
sun and trying to catch it’. Before long, as he learnt to walk and run, there
were many small things that held his interest and excited him. He was quite
taken with ‘horses and elephants of clay, preferring them to the real ones
belonging to his father and would ‘run after a bunch of peacocks to get
hold of their flowing tails’. He also picked up pretty quickly the sounds
made by peacocks, parrots, nightingales, horses and elephants and would
imitate them with absolute ease; and he would often naughtily put the fear
of God in the minds of his and his mothers adoring attendants by springing
upon them all of a sudden with the roar of a tiger.31
As a little boy, Shivaji was extremely active and agile. And he had striking
features. His nose was sharp and pointed; his forehead was broad and of an
excellent proportion; and he had an endearing smile. An English chaplain
who saw him later in life observed that Shivaji had a ‘quick and piercing
eye’ and described him as ‘whiter than any of his people’.32 The boy would
be dressed in a tunic, with a pagdi on his head and an ornamental tuft called
an aigrette, and he had slightly long hair on the sides. In adulthood, as
records maintained by English officials tell us, Shivaji grew to be a man of
middle height, with an erect bearing, and whenever he spoke, it appeared as
if he were smiling.33 Shivaji’s earliest foreign biographer Cosme da Guarda,
noted similarly that Shivaji was ‘quick in action’ and ‘lively in carriage’,
‘with a clear and fair face’, and his ‘dark big eyes were so lively that they
seemed to dart rays of fire’.34
When Shivaji was six years old, the Nizam Shahi fell, the Mughals and the
Adil Shahi splitting its dominions among themselves. Shahaji joined the
Adil Shahi state and was immediately sent by his new masters on a
campaign, led by Ranadulla Khan, to conquer Karnataka. From 1636 his
base was Bangalore (now Bengaluru), and once the Adil Shahi had won
Bangalore, the town was gifted by Ranadulla Khan to Shahaji as his jagir.
Shahaji chose to stay there for good. With him was the older son, Sambhaji,
and his own second wife. Well after his marriage to Jijabai, Shahaji had
married Tukabai Mohite,35 sister of Sambhaji Mohite, a fort commander in
the Pune–Supe belt. He had a son by her, Ekoji or Vyankoji, a little after
Shivaji’s birth.36 Shivaji would have a fraught relationship all his life with
this stepbrother, who would go on to become the founder of the Thanjavur
Maratha Raj. Shahaji also had at least two and at the most four sons by
other women outside of marriage; in an act of extraordinary loyalty at a
critical moment in Shivaji’s life, one of these stepbrothers, Hiroji, replaced
him in a confinement chamber in Agra when the Maratha leader made his
escape from Aurangzeb’s custody!37
It seems likely that in 1637–38, Shivaji and Jijabai went to live with
Shahaji in Bangalore. If Shahaji had gained Bangalore, he had also retained
some of his earlier mokasas or areas where he had revenue collection rights,
particularly across his Pune jagir. In these areas he appointed Dadoji
Konddev, a kulkarni or account keeper (of the Brahmin caste), as his agent.
According to one account, Dadoji was told to shift Jijabai and Shivaji from
Shivneri in Junnar to Pune, and according to another, it was only Dadoji
who was in Pune, whereas Jijabai and Shivaji were based in Bangalore with
Shahaji until Shivaji turned twelve years old. A third possibility indicated is
that while Dadoji alone looked after Shahaji’s Pune estate from 1636 to
1642, Shivaji and Jijabai intermittently moved between Pune and Bangalore
until Shivaji turned twelve.
Even though it was the eldest son, Sambhaji, and the youngest, Ekoji from
the second wife, who were always with him, Shahaji’s affection for Shivaji
does not seem to have wavered, regardless of how little he saw his younger
son between the ages of six and twelve. Shivaji, the records tell us, was
‘extremely dear to his father, and Shahaji sincerely believed it was after
Shivaji’s birth that his own life had taken a turn for the better, for he ‘had
seen much prosperity’. Shivabharat also states that though Shahaji had
more than one wife, it was ‘Jadhavrao’s daughter, Jijabai’ who held ‘pride
of place in his heart’.38
At the age of seven, Shivaji was ready to learn the letters of the Marathi or
Devanagari alphabet, his father felt; he appointed a good tutor for his son
and the children of some of his close associates. Shivaji was a quick learner
when it came to writing and later gained expertise not only in horse riding
and elephant riding but in archery, marksmanship, and wielding both the
spear and the sword.39 Once Shivaji had turned twelve, Shahaji summoned
him, along with Jijabai and Dadoji, to Bangalore which suggests they had
moved back to Maratha country at least some time before that and asked
him to officially take charge of his Pune jagir from then on.40 Shahaji gave
his son ‘some elephants, horses and infantry’ and equipped him with some
‘material resources’ as well.41 Importantly, he sent with him Shamrao
Nilkanth as the peshwa or prime minister, Balkrishnapant a cousin of
Shahaji’s agent in Bangalore Naropant Dikshit as the mujumdar or
auditor, Sonopant as the dabir or counsellor, and Raghunath Ballal as
sabnis or head clerk.42 Shahaji was thus equipping Shivaji with staff and
entourage he could rely on in overseeing the jagirs affairs.
Some nineteenth-century Marathi chroniclers write of Shivaji’s visit to
Bijapur at the age of twelve. According to their version, Shahaji took the
boy to the sultan’s court, where the self-respecting Shivaji created quite an
embarrassment for his father by refusing to pay obeisance to the Adil Shah
despite his fathers express instructions. The same tale has it that Shivaji
was appalled by the sight of cow slaughter in Bijapur, and according to one
British official and chronicler of Shivaji’s life, Dennis Kincaid, he went to
the extent of registering a ‘public protest’ there against the killing of cows.43
The reality is that the whole thing is an invention and an interpolation by
these chroniclers to show Shivaji as rebellious and claim that he had an
early dislike of Islam and of Muslims. But, as discussed earlier in the
introduction, he never demonstrated any personal dislike of Muslims or
their faith; instead, he continued grants to mosques given before his time
and, as we have noted, explicitly told his soldiers to treat holy men of the
faith, and especially their holy text, the Quran, with respect. Shivaji went to
Bangalore at that time to see his father, and never did the two travel to
Bijapur together.
A much more important event than a visit to the Adil Shahi capital did
occur in Shivaji’s life at the age of twelve, just before he left Bangalore for
Pune. His parents got him married. His bride was Saibai, the daughter of
Mudhoji Naik Nimbalkar.44 The Nimbalkars, whose original surname was
Pawar, were the same family of Phaltan that Shahaji’s mother Umabai
hailed from.45 So ties of kinship already existed, which made the fixing of
the matrimonial alliance easier. We know astonishingly little about Saibai,
who died quite early, in the year 1659, just two years after she gave birth to
Sambhaji, their first offspring. An incident recorded by the Marathas’
nineteenth-century British chronicler James Grant Duff is about the only
one that mentions her role in her husband’s life, and suggests that it was
quite political. In 1648, Shahaji Raje Bhosle was placed in a dungeon by the
Adil Shah, whom he was then serving, on the suspicion that he was aiding
his eighteen-year-old son Shivaji’s rebellious activities. Shivaji had then
captured a few forts around Pune, and the Adil Shah saw it as an egregious
act of disloyalty. The door of the dungeon had only a small opening, and
‘he was told that, if within a certain period his son did not submit, the
aperture should for ever be closed’. Shivaji saw the danger his father was
facing. Saibai offered her husband her firm opinion at this critical moment:
she told him that he shouldn’t submit, and that ‘he had a better chance of
effecting Shahjee’s liberty by maintaining his present power, than by
trusting to the mercy of a government notoriously treacherous’.46
Eventually, Shahaji was released after Shivaji played his cards wisely and
well. Shivaji married eight times, two of these marriages taking place while
Saibai was still alive, in an age in which marriage was an instrument of
politics and geopolitics.
Shahaji’s affection and fondness for Shivaji, and his authorization for him
to run his jagir at the age of twelve notwithstanding, the big emotional
anchor for Shivaji right through his childhood was his mother and she
would remain so later in his life too. Resolute in her patience and fortitude,
Jijabai was a remarkable woman. She had suffered the trauma of a clash
between her own family and that of her husband, which had led to a loss of
lives. She had seen the greater trauma of the cold-blooded killing of her
father and brothers in the Nizam Shah’s court. During long periods of her
pregnancy and during the first six years of Shivaji’s life and the time spent
between Bangalore and Pune, her husband was away for extended periods
of time, and she faced tremendous uncertainty and anxiety. She remained in
the fortress of her elder son’s in-laws for years, a setting far from
comfortable despite a number of attendants around; there was no saying
when forces hostile to her husband or to her son’s relatives might storm the
fort or the jagirs of Bangalore and Pune. The possibility of a kidnap, if not
outright slaughter, was a real one in particular when she was at Shivneri; at
the very least, there could be an attempted assault that might result in injury,
a frightening prospect for a mother raising a small child. Situated in the
heart of the western Deccan, Junnar and its surroundings were one of the
chief battlegrounds where armies of various states had clashed for
supremacy, and the battles either continued during the early years of
Shivaji’s life leaving in their wake desolation and ruin or were replaced
by a ceasefire that was more an uneasy lull before a storm than genuine
peace.
In spite of the deeply patriarchal society she doubtlessly inhabited a
society in which the exterior or interior lives of women like her were never
vividly rendered by contemporary chroniclers, resulting in a serious paucity
of authentic information for modern-day biographers Jijabai was not
altogether without agency as a woman. She had been brought up in relative
comfort in Sindkhed, the daughter of a distinguished noble; and even in the
Bhosle clan, there was evidence that women had certain undeniable rights.
For example, the region of Ellora which Shivaji’s great-grandfather and
Maloji’s father (Babaji Bhosle) had inherited was a legacy from his
mothers side and not a paternal gift. As we know, Jijabai also had with her
– in Junnar and in Pune – numerous attendants and staff members appointed
by Shahaji. That was more than many other women of the time could ask
for. But there was, without doubt, serious turbulence in the air.
In Jijabai’s case, the turbulence was both physical, in her surroundings,
and psychological, in the overall uncertainty of her situation. In spite of that
she raised Shivaji with tremendous emotional vigour. It may have been her
reserves of self-belief, and her sheer hope in the future despite everything
she was witnessing, which might have kept her going while dedicating her
time and effort to her growing son. Or she might have been inspired by
Hindu religious texts such as the Puranas or the twin epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata, the staple spiritual and intellectual diet for women of the era
as well as their children with their stories of valour, strength and the
ultimate triumph of truth. Whatever it might have been, in Jijabai, her son
Shivaji evidently saw the kind of steel that would be his inner and intimate
armour as he began to carve out his own destiny.
B.M. Purandare, better known as Babasaheb Purandare. No relation of this biographer. He has been
easily the most well-known Shivaji eulogist in Maharashtra since the 1960s and 1970s, and has done
much to popularize the Shivaji legend. The name of the play referred to here is Jaanta Raja, which is
almost always mistakenly written in English as Janata Raja. Jaanta means enlightened in Marathi,
and the title of the play is translated as ‘Enlightened King’, while Janata means ‘the people’.
Chitnis Bakhar (Chronicle), 23, quoted in G.B. Mehendale, Shri Raja Shiv Chhatrapati, Vol. 1
(Marathi) (Diamond Publications, 2008). Henceforth referred to as Mehendale (Marathi); all
translations from it are mine.
Shivabharat, by Parmanand, translated into Marathi from the original Sanskrit by S.M. Divekar
(Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Shalivahan Saka 1849 [1927]), 55. Henceforth referred to as
Shivabharat; all translations from it are mine.
James Fergusson and James Burgess, The Cave Temples of India (Oriental Books, [1880] 1969),
248–252. Some of the details of the Shivneri caves are from Vidya Dehejia, ‘Early Buddhist Caves
at Junnar’, Artibus Asiae 31 (1969), 147–166.
Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 2, Part 4,
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14–15.
‘Maharashtra’ here is the word used for the Marathi-speaking regions of the Deccan and not the
linguistic state with the boundaries that came into being in 1960.
Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 2, Part 4,
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12–13.
Ibid.
Hsuan Tsang quoted in A.R. Kulkarni, Studies in Maratha History (Diamond Publications, 2009), 1.
Afterword by Martha Ann Selby in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, trans., The Absent Traveller: Prakrit
Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala (Penguin Books, 2008), 72.
Ibid., 72–73.
Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge
University Press, South Asia edition, 2020), 9–22.
Ibid., 91.
G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1 (Munshiram Manoharlal, 1986), 60.
Jadunath Sarkar, House of Shivaji (S.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1948), 33–41.
Ibid., 41–44.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2, 524.
Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge, trans., Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Memoirs of Jahangir: From the
First to the Twelfth Year of His Reign (Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), 312–313.
Ibid.
William Foster, The English Factories in India, 1618–1621 (Clarendon Press, 1906), 332.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 14, 20.
Shivabharat, by Parmanand, quoted in R.P. Patwardhan and H.G. Rawlinson, Source Book of
Maratha History (K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1928), 3; Shivabharat, 19.
This Sambhaji was the son of Maloji’s brother and Shahaji’s uncle, Vithoji.
A.R. Kulkarni and G.H. Khare, Marathyancha Itihas, Vol. 1 (Marathi) (Continental Prakashan, [1984]
2021), 77.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 478–481; Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 63–65.
Ibid.
G.S. Sardesai, Marathi Riyasat, Khand [Vol.] 1 (Popular Prakashan, [1902] 2017), 55.
Shivabharat, by Parmanand, quoted in Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History,
9.
Badshah Nama of Abdu-l Hamid Lahori, translated and quoted in H.M. Elliot and John Dowson, The
History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, Vol. 7 (Trubner and Co., 1887), 24.
Shivabharat, 58.
Ibid., 60–63.
The English chaplain L’Escaliot quoted in Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (Orient
BlackSwan, [1920] 2010), XV.
B.G. Paranjape, ed., English Records on Shivaji (1659–1682) (Shiva Charitra Karyalaya, 1931), 73.
‘Life of the Celebrated Sevagy, Cosme da Guarda’, in Surendra Nath Sen, ed., Foreign Biographies
of Shivaji (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd; Calcutta: Girindranath Mitra, 1927), 2.
G.B. Mehendale, Shivaji: His Life and Times (Param Mitra Publications, 2011), 680.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Shivabharat, 82.
Ibid., 83–84, 90; Sabhasad, 3–4.
Shivabharat, 85.
Ibid., 88.
Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History, 55.
Dennis Kincaid, The Grand Rebel (Rupa Publications, 2020 edition), 43.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2, 1125.
Ibid.
James Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas, Vol. 1 (R. Cambray & Co., 1912), 113.
OceanofPDF.com
2
Notice to the Adil Shah
Pune was a ghost town in 1630–31. If anything was in abundance there, it
was wolves and other beasts. It had been little more than a kasba to begin
with a village with a marketplace where people from neighbouring
villages converged once a week to buy their essentials. But the depredations
of warring armies had laid it waste, and one general (called Murar Jagdev)
of the Adil Shahi kingdom in particular had brutally vandalized it when the
Nizam Shahi found itself cornered after Malik Ambars death, apparently
going to the extent of getting donkeys to drive a plough around the place
and implanting an iron rod in the soil both signs to indicate the kasba was
cursed. Whatever little crop, cultivation, vegetation and human habitation
still remained was wrecked by the Deccan famine of 1629 to 1631.
So resettling the population and recovering a semblance of normal life was
the top priority. Dadoji Konddev, an agent of Shivaji’s father, had launched
that work when he was asked by Shahaji to look after the family jagir in
1636. With Jijabai and Shivaji moving there in 1642 and with Shahaji’s
younger son officially assuming charge, resettlement and rehabilitation
picked up pace. As all the houses in the village had been either destroyed or
burnt, Dadoji immediately initiated the construction of a comfortable
dwelling for the mother–son duo. It would be a one-storeyed structure,
called Lal Mahal; a little enclave to be built around it would be named
Shivapur; and around the house, there would be an orchard.
Dadoji declared war on the wolves, promising monetary reward to anyone
who would kill them and also the tigers and other wild animals that prowled
around. Cultivators were wooed with specific offers. Land was given to
them at a nominal rent for the first year; in later years, the rent would
increase only marginally, they were promised. Of every ten trees planted,
the plot owner could have one to himself and pay taxes for the others; of the
total crop, one-third would be taken by the jagirdar, and two-thirds would
remain with the plot owner. After a long time, lands were measured,
ownership or rental status ascertained, and wells and canals built;
remuneration was paid for those who worked on them.
Shahaji’s jagir, though, was much bigger than the kasba at its core. There
was the broader Pune pargana or district comprising more than 250
villages. To the main kasbas south-east were Supe and Shirwal, districts
with about sixty and forty villages respectively. And there were the Mavals,
the mountainous valleys to the west of Pune. If a diagonal line were drawn
from the jagirs western corner of Lonavla to its other, south-eastern corner
of Indapur, it would cover 200 kilometres.1
Naturally, the effects of the developments in Pune were quickly felt in the
wider jagir. Several of Pune’s erstwhile villagers, displaced and destitute,
came back, relieved to get cash for killing beasts and equally relieved to
return to cultivation and more normal ways. Many rural folk and hill people
had also descended into poverty as a result of the famine and political
instability. This was the environment in which Shivaji, just a teenager at the
time, gradually began to emerge as an authority figure. As he started taking
matters in his own hands, he was astute enough to extend land and revenue
arrangements similar to those in Pune all across his fathers jagir, ensuring
that more and more land came under cultivation and irrigation. The
response was encouraging. ‘New crops were reared in every village;
mango, tamarind, pomegranate, lemon came to be planted afresh.’2 The
result was that quite a lot of ordinary people from one end of the jagir to
another found productive and paying work and a sense of hope.3
Of greatest significance were the teenaged Shivaji’s forays into the
Mavals, which, apart from the Pune pargana, were directly under him; for
the other areas, as yet, Dadoji was both directly and indirectly responsible.
The twelve hills and valleys, each with their individual nomenclatures but
collectively known as the Mavals, were among the most neglected parts of
the upper and western Deccan. They were not easy to access; their soil was
rocky and impoverished; cultivation was sparser than elsewhere and spread
chiefly next to the streams flowing along the hill slopes. The people were
hardy and resilient. Their identities Maratha, Kunbi, Bhil, Koli or any
other – were distilled into a single term, ‘Mavale’, which simply meant ‘the
people of the Mavals’. Indeed, ‘Maval’ itself was a generic term derived
from the word mavalti, denoting the areas (valleys) where darkness
descended first as the sun went down behind the mountains. Sunset or not,
large parts of the valleys were always blanketed in shadow, so the name
Maval had stuck.
If the administration everywhere was hamstrung by political and military
conflict, in these parts it was often mostly absent, with many officials not
even setting foot on what they considered insupportable soil, with risky
cliffs, edges and ravines. And the hill people and fief holders such as the
deshmukhs (district-level revenue collectors) fought interminable
succession battles for whatever land and assessment rights there were on
offer. These land fights, which might have been endemic because families
depended almost entirely on these lands for their sustenance and survival,
constituted the principal weakness of the region and its inhabitants.
Remarkably, Shivaji made these very cliffs, edges, ledges and ravines that
were studiously avoided by so many his chief stomping grounds; and the
young men of the area became his bosom mates. Shivaji was athletic,
supple, extremely active and adventurous. He began to spend virtually all
day in these inaccessible parts, venturing with his friends into treacherous
corners where even horses feared to tread, and examining the heights and
the depths, the gaps and the gorges, the slippery slopes and the occasionally
smooth but hard-to-detect and barely visible pathways. From an early age
he had natural personal charisma and demonstrated a genuine warmth
towards those he reached out to and befriended. He was intensely curious,
keen to get together a bunch of buddies, and to know the people who lived
in his fathers jagir and around it really well. For the hills and its
inhabitants he showed what they perceived to be a natural, spontaneous
affinity, and he started making deep connections with the land and its
ordinary people. His easy nature and his soft, winning smile in particular
noted by several contemporaries who met him4 disarmed even sceptics
who initially kept a cautious distance from their new, and very young,
administrator. Three members of his band of brothers are particularly
notable: Tanaji Malusare, Yesaji Kank and Baji Pasalkar. They would
contribute very handsomely to Shivaji’s life and work.
One of the most pervasive myths of Maratha history is that around this
time, at a very young age, Shivaji, along with a few select mates, took the
oath of ‘Hindawi Swaraj’ in the temple of Raireshwar in 1645.5 Two letters
purportedly reminding a certain Dadaji Naras Prabhu of this oath, claimed
to have been written by Shivaji himself, have been cited to suggest that
such a thing happened. However, both the letters have been conclusively
established by outstanding historians of the Maratha period as latter-day
forgeries. The manipulation was apparently done by Dadaji Naras Prabhu’s
family in an attempt to establish its claim over one of the Mavals, Rohid
Khore, in a protracted property dispute.6 Not surprisingly, though, the
romantic oath-taking episode, with Shivaji and his Maval associates
drawing blood from their fingers with their swords and sprinkling a few
drops on Lord Shiva’s linga in the temple while taking their vows, has
proved to be enduring in public memory. Evocative in its appeal, it has been
an intrinsic part of textbooks in Maharashtra, not to count the number of
movies and plays in which it has been depicted.
However, there is no doubt that Shivaji’s bond with his friends from the
Mavals was formidably strong, and they rewarded his attachment to them
many times over. Bereft and largely forgotten, the Mavals, on the outer
edges even of Deccani consciousness, would be the womb from which
Shivaji’s independent state would emerge.
Soon after Shivaji turned fourteen, the Adil Shahi kingdom began to
express its distrust with the goings-on in Shahaji’s jagir. Shivaji was not
just scanning the territory and establishing contact with the local populace.
As the Adil Shahi state well knew, apart from befriending the common folk,
he was getting in touch with the hereditary deshmukhs and acquainting
himself with other officials as well. There were the patils, for instance, who
were in charge of revenue collection at the village level, and the kulkarnis,
who kept the village books in order. The deshmukh did at the wider district
level what the patil did in the village, and the deshpande or deshkulkarni
maintained the district’s accounts.
All these state functionaries were termed watandars or holders of the
watan, an Arabic word for land, and their rights were hereditary, though
they could be withdrawn at any time if watandars incurred the rulers
wrath. They were also responsible for bringing lands under the plough and
keeping track of sowing and harvesting patterns within their jurisdictions.
For the duties they performed, they were paid in cash and kind from
collections from their own domains and thus from the villagers themselves;
in addition, they were entitled to receive ‘voluntary’ gifts from villagers and
from the twelve balutedars or service providers who were part of every
village set-up, such as the potter, barber, tailor, ironsmith and carpenter,
among others. Those who owned lands were called mirasdars, and they in
turn were the principal remunerators of the twelve balutedars and the big
contributors to a patils and deshmukhs kitty. There were those from
outside the hamlet, too, who occasionally came to do odd jobs; they were
described as upri (outsiders) and couldn’t claim any social rights if they
clashed with a native dweller. Together, the watandars, mirasdars,
balutedars and upris formed the four branches of a village unit, and Shivaji
was closely familiarizing himself with all of them.
Importantly, a patil or deshmukh was often called to offer military service
or assistance to the state by mobilizing and even leading forces. Equally
importantly, there were forts across the region whose commanders were
appointed by the durbar and were directly under the state’s control. These
commanders often cocked a snook at local-level state officials and acted
independently. What became evident to Bijapur early on was that Shivaji
and Dadoji Konddev had started speaking to some of them as well.
Why did that matter? Had Shivaji rebelled against the Adil Shah? He
hadn’t, up until that point. While Shivaji’s reaching out to local officials had
got Bijapurs antenna up, these efforts by themselves would not have
resulted in any action. What complicated matters was, typically, a factional
fight in the Adil Shah’s court. Shahaji Raje Bhosle had done extremely well
under the patronage of the Bijapur general Ranadulla Khan. In 1643,
however, Khan died, and his intra-state rival, Mustafa Khan, rose in stature.
Earlier, Shahaji had been given the endearment farzand (son) by the Adil
Shah for his feats in the southern campaigns;7 now, he was vilified as a
troublemaker. On 1 August 1644, Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah issued a
farman or directive to Kanhoji Jedhe, one of the more powerful deshmukhs
of Maval, stating that ‘Shahaji Bhonsla’ had ‘become a rebel against this
august Court’, that Shahaji’s agent Dadoji Konddev was up to no good in
Kondhana district in the neighbourhood, and that Jedhe must immediately
join Khandoji Khopde and Baji Ghorpade who’d been dispatched to
‘destroy’ Konddev.8 Another farman of the same period states that the
hands of a representative of Shahaji near Kondhana had been cut off as
punishment.9 Was this representative Dadoji Konddev? There’s no evidence
to that effect, but decades and even centuries later, an interesting myth came
to be circulated about Dadoji Konddev. According to it, Dadoji once
plucked an apple from the orchard he had built in Shivapur near Lal Mahal.
But it then occurred to him that he hadn’t asked his master, Shivaji, if he
could take it and so, in order to publicly discipline himself, he chopped off
the arm that had pulled out the fruit. Is the myth related to the factional
fight? We have no way of knowing.
What we do know, however, is that Shivaji’s fathers estates in Pune and
Supe were taken away from him after the Adil Shah’s orders. The Adil
Shah’s forces attacked these estates in 1644 on the suspicion that Shahaji
was revolting, and took over the area for four months. But the rift was
clearly not deep because the lands were restored, by the end of the same
year, for reasons that were never made clear.10
Apart from the vagaries of the Adil Shahi court, the young Shivaji also
became aware of the growing strain of bigotry in the court (which may have
been a factor that went against Shahaji during the standoff). The days of the
state practising pluralism, as in the sixteenth century, were fading, and
fanaticism had taken root. By the fourth decade of the seventeenth century,
except for Shahaji and Baji Ghorpade, ‘the high barons of Bijapur were
Muslims’; as many rajas from the south had joined Bijapur after asking
Shahaji to mediate on their behalf, his rivals ‘poisoned Adil Shah’s ears
against him’ by alleging Shahaji was trying to become independent with the
support of the rajas.11 While Shahaji’s patron Ranadulla Khan was around,
the poison hadn’t seeped in; after his demise, it did.
Shivaji could not but be aware of all of this because the reigning
Muhammad Adil Shah had pronounced three openly discriminatory
regulations against Hindus, who formed the majority of his state’s
population. The first stipulated that only Muslims be appointed governors in
the provinces, while Hindus could be given clerical and non-executive
posts; no executive responsibilities, and no governorships, would go to
Brahmins and other Hindus, for they were ‘disturbers of the land and the
faith’. The second order said all efforts must be made to ‘propagate the
rules of Islam’, with ‘no infidel’ being allowed to insult, oppress or claim
equality with a weak Muslim; Muslims who injured infidels, on the other
hand, need only be admonished orally ‘but never punished in any way
for the sake of the infidel’. Third, Muslims were told to refrain from
participating in ‘infidel celebrations like Holi, Diwali, Dassehra’ because
these were ‘bad’, though, as a concession, these celebrations were not
banned, so the Muslims couldn’t ‘object’ to them or ‘obstruct’ them either.12
When Shivaji started issuing orders in his own name at the young age of
sixteen, though only as administrator of his fathers jagir, the language he
chose for making his official seal was Sanskrit. This was a direct departure
from the well-established norm of the Persianate Age: his father Shahaji,
mother Jijabai and Shahaji’s agent Dadoji all had their seals in Persian, as
did the other Hindu chieftains of the various Muslim kingdoms. The
Persianization of the courts and of administrative documents was near-
complete during this period. Yet Shivaji seemed to have made a conscious
choice, and the language of the seal is the first unmistakable evidence of the
Hindu element in Shivaji’s political philosophy. His Hindu worldview
looked at all religions as sacrosanct. But with a clear sense of his own
cultural and religious identity, an identity he did not want obliterated or
deliberately sidelined, he embraced and endorsed Sanskrit in order to
underline that sense of selfhood.
Interestingly, the vernacular Marathi was also used in official
correspondence at the time. All the letters and farmans were issued in
Persian, and wherever necessary, for the comprehension of local officials
and the local populace, their translations were readily made and provided
by the Islamic states. Even so, the Marathi copies of letters and other
correspondence never carried official seals in the vernacular. The official
signature had the element of both legality and sanctity, and Shivaji’s act of
choosing Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Hindus in which the two great
epics and important sacred texts like the Vedas, the Upanishads and the
Puranas had been composed, even over his native Marathi, was definitely a
statement.
Shivaji’s official imprint was hexagonal in shape, and on it was inscribed a
line: ‘Ever increasing in luminosity like the moon at the start of the brighter
half of the lunar month and esteemed across the world, this seal of Shivaji,
son of Shahaji, shines for the betterment of all.’13 The earliest letter which
carries his Sanskrit imprint is from 28 January 1646, and it is about an
extraordinarily decisive verdict that Shivaji gave at the very young age of
sixteen. This was on a complaint of sexual assault made by an ordinary
village woman against a patil in Khede Bare near Pune. The ruling went
like this:
To the officials, deshmukhs and deshkulkarnis of Khede Bare:
The mokadam [another name for patil] of Ranjhe village in Khede Bare, Babaji Bhikaji Gujar,
committed an act of sexual misdemeanour while carrying out his responsibilities in the village.
The matter was reported to Saheb [Shivaji]. The Saheb ordered that he [the patil] be arrested
immediately and brought before him. The offence was established after an inquiry. So Babaji was
sacked from his post and his hands and legs were cut off. At that time, Sonaji Banaji Gujar of the
Purandar fort made a plea that Babaji be handed over to him as he was his relative. The request
was granted and Babaji was fined 300 Padshahi hons (a unit in currency). As Sonaji is Babaji’s
kin and Babaji has no offspring, Sonaji Banaji Gujar has been granted the post of mokadam of
Ranjhe village now and 200 Padshahi hons recovered as fee for the government treasury. No one
should obstruct him in the discharge of his duties.14
The ruling, delivered in a period when capital punishment was deemed
acceptable, was welcomed by the majority of commoners who had seen
officials not being held accountable for their actions, or sexual
misdemeanours not being taken seriously. By promptly punishing a sexual
offender, Shivaji was giving the ordinary villagers what they had long
hoped for: a modicum of accountability from officials. This act is among
the earliest where Shivaji truly becomes the expression of a popular will.
By several such acts and measures in his life, he became a darling of his
people, who felt that he represented light at the end of the tunnel. And if
this light slowly grew brighter and spread wider, they were bound to
appreciate it, initially quietly and increasingly openly as Shivaji started
gaining new aides and allies. For the violation of women’s bodies and
psyche he would continue to demonstrate a zero-tolerance policy, which
was extraordinary and radical for the age he lived in. It convinced the
ordinary folk in the Deccan hills that he had a gift for empathy and that the
most vulnerable of them could expect from him justice, equity and fairness.
There has for long been a debate about whether Shivaji sought to establish
his own raj right from the beginning or whether his story should be seen as
one of an expanding vision. It is clearly evident from his early decision on
his seal and his act of punishing the patil of Ranjhe that he was keen to
branch out on his own. He believed in a new way of doing things. He
started out as a natural rebel, the son of a jagirdar militating against the
well-established system of doing and arranging things, and then he began
moving inexorably in only one direction: of freeing his land from the
culture of oppression, suppression, harassment and ignominy heaped by the
many sultanates and the mighty empire of the Mughals who had their
original home on the steppes of Central Asia. The rest of Shivaji’s life
with all its victories, defeats, compromises, adjustments, retreats – has to be
seen in the light of this clarity of thinking and intent he demonstrated at the
age of sixteen.
Shivaji’s initial moves may well have made entrenched stakeholders in the
system wary, but he was not a man to be deterred by such considerations,
and he continued to take bold steps, even beyond the domain of
administrative procedure.
He was careful while Dadoji Konddev was around as the overall custodian
of Shahaji’s jagir. After his death in 1647, Shivaji, not yet eighteen, moved
quickly. Within a year and a half, he took four forts, all just to the south of
Pune pargana and highly useful for a pushback in case the Bijapur force,
which had attacked in 1644, attacked again. With control of the forts,
Shivaji had the means to block Bijapurs advances from the south into his
own estates in and around Pune, and also receive early warnings of any
advance.
The most crucial of these was Murumbdeo, which Shivaji renamed
Rajgad. Situated more than 4,574 feet above sea level,15 it had a base that
ran across several kilometres, making any siege difficult. Shivaji found it
unoccupied, saw its potential and further built on it. The spotting itself was
smart work, made possible by the fact that Shivaji wasn’t cooped up in his
home or principal kasba of Pune but was busy exploring the Mavals where
this citadel stood. From the top the fort provided a nearly 360-degree view
of its surroundings, including the vast sprawl to the west that led to the
Konkan coastline. Shivaji’s distinctive creative contribution to its natural
strength was the construction of three machis or flat-lined terraces in three
directions. Each of these terraces, at approximately 4,000 feet above sea
level, was over a mile wide, had two or three tiers, and was fortified with
walls; the result was that they virtually became independent forts in their
own right, offering protection to the topmost part, known as the bale-killa,
where the residential quarters and offices would be built.16
The Mughal chronicler of Aurangzeb’s reign reluctantly conceded
Shivaji’s astuteness, stating:
The infernal Shiva after getting possession [of Rajgad] made terraces on three sides around it on a
lower level [machi] and there built three strong forts, namely Suvela and Padmavati situated
towards Konkan uplands, and Sanjivani on the side of Konkan lowlands; he thus made its capture
by any enemy impossible The infidel had formed a triangular enclosure, which is called a
sund [elephant’s trunk] in the language of military fortification, by erecting two thick walls from
the postern-gate (wicket) of the fort of Padmavati to the end of the hillock, and making these two
walls meet at a point. Below both of these (walls) the path declines so sharply and is so full of
slippery holes that no one can pass there on foot.17
Further, the Mughal historian wrote, in an age in which no attacks could
take place from the skies, ‘Fort Rajgad is a hill second only to the fort of the
towered sky. Its circuit is twelve kos [one kos is around 2 kilometres].
Imagination cannot estimate its height. Its thorny jungles and spectre-
haunted chasms can be traversed only by the wind. Nothing can descend on
it except rain!’18
The other unoccupied fort Shivaji took almost simultaneously was Torna.
About 7 kilometres to Rajgad’s north-west, in later years it came to be
known as the Eagle’s Nest and the ‘sentinel’ of Rajgad, which went on to
become Shivaji’s capital until 1670. Torna towered above any other fort in
the vicinity, even above Rajgad, at 4,600 feet. According to legend, Shivaji
found some war materials there and a stack of funds,19 which he used for
the purpose of arming his Maval associates, carrying out construction work
on Rajgad, and repairing some dilapidated structures that stood atop Torna
itself.
The first fort Shivaji won by way of either assault or subterfuge was
Kondhana or Sinhagad, right in the centre of a ring of forts around Pune and
thus of strategic significance. Held earlier by the Khiljis and later by the
Bahmani kingdom, it had passed eventually into the hands of the Nizam
Shahi. Post 1636, it was held by the Adil Shahi and included in Shahaji’s
jagir, where it was unequivocally stated, unlike in the case of most other
forts, that it would be under Shahaji’s representative. But after the passing
of Dadoji Konddev, the Adil Shah took it away from Shahaji’s control and
appointed Mian Rahim Muhammad as the in-charge.20 Two reliable
chronicles of Shivaji’s life have given differing versions of how Kondhana
was seized: one, by Sabhasad, says it was by assault, after which ‘Shivaji
established his own military outpost (thana) there’,21 and the other, Jedhe
Shakavali, indicates it was by diplomatic manoeuvres initiated with the
assistance of Bapuji Mudgal Narhekar, the deshpande of Khede Bare, one
of the Mavals.22 Kondhana’s other, equally well-known moniker, was
Sinhagad; the two names were used interchangeably.
Shivaji next zoomed in on the fort of Purandar which, unlike the other
three forts on Pune’s south-west, was slightly to its south-east and would
help to ring-fence the chief village of the jagir. Purandar was under the Adil
Shahi, and its commandant, a Brahmin named Nilo Nilkanth Sarnaik or
Nilkanth Rao ‘a friend and neighbour of Shahaji and his family’23 had
died recently, triggering a squabble among his three sons over who would
get to keep it. Shivaji offered to mediate, threw all three brothers into
prison, and took over the fort. Soon the brothers were released, and each
was given watan grants beneath the fort; they accepted the grants offered by
Shivaji and pledged loyalty to him.24
All along, as he went about gaining these first four forts, Shivaji cleverly
professed total loyalty to Bijapur and when asked by the Adil Shah, his
father Shahaji said he was holding them on the Sultanate’s behalf, either
because they stood abandoned or needed order and organization.25 Initially
Bijapur didn’t have much to complain about, as Rajgad and Torna were
without any troops, but Sinhagad, held by a Bijapur-appointed commander,
was a different matter. It was a prized possession owing to its location and
steep slopes; and it had a reputation that the other three forts hadn’t earned.
Why had Shivaji taken that one if he only wanted to fortify Bijapurs
position, the Adil Shah wondered. And he concluded correctly that what he
was seeing in Shivaji was a rebel taking his first few bold steps.
The backlash for Shivaji came in two ways: his father Shahaji was once
more in trouble with Adil Shah, who also sent out a force to put down
Shivaji’s incipient rebellion and received a response that took him
completely by surprise.
But first, Shahaji’s story. At the time, he was part of a military campaign
under the leadership of Mustafa Khan, laying siege to Jinji deep in Tamil
country. As noted earlier, Mustafa Khan deeply disliked Shahaji, who’d
been close to his bête noire Ranadulla Khan. He accused Shahaji of non-
cooperation during the siege, implying Shahaji was using his influence with
the Hindu rajas of the south against Bijapur. This accusation was bolstered
by tying Shahaji to Shivaji’s activities.26
Early on the morning of 25 July 1648, Bijapur nobles ‘Baji Ghorpade,
Yashwantrao and Asad Khan’27 entered an unsuspecting Shahaji’s chamber
in the Jinji camp and placed him in fetters for alleged disobedience. Until
December, when the Jinji fort was won by the Adil Shahi forces, he was
kept in custody there. And though Mustafa Khan died in November before
the siege ended, Shahaji remained out of favour and was sent back to
Bijapur in chains along with the loot of eighty-nine elephants under the
watch of the general Afzal Khan, who had distinguished himself in the
battle. Once in Bijapur, Afzal Khan was felicitated and Shahaji was thrown
into prison on the court’s orders.28
Days after Shahaji’s arrest, Adil Shah sent one fighting unit to his
Bangalore base, where Shahaji’s older son Sambhaji beat it back. A second
force was sent against Shivaji. It was to be led by Fatah Khan. This Khan
was not an Adil Shahi leading light, unlike the other three Ranadulla,
Mustafa and Afzal – and was chosen because Shivaji was, at this stage, seen
as a minor irritant who could easily be shown his place. Shivaji didn’t have
a large force, and Fatah Khan, with just a couple of thousand people, could
effortlessly take care of things or so Adil Shah believed. Just to make
sure, he wrote to the deshmukhs around Pune ordering them to join Fatah
Khan’s men.29
The resistance put up by Shivaji’s men in this very first violent skirmish
with the Adil Shahi turned out to be of the kind of steel and remarkable
resolve Bijapur hadn’t bargained for. Fatah Khan left for Sinhagad from
Bijapur, which was over 280 kilometres away, but along the way he heard
that Shivaji had moved to the fort of Purandar, so the Bijapur forces were
turned in that direction. Purandar had a string of hills covering about 4
kilometres and rising progressively in height from left to right. From the
summit, both east and west were easily visible, an advantage for a defender
with a small force unlike Sinhagad, where a defender could be taken by
surprise owing to the vertical climb. Shivaji’s own sources of intelligence
were very reliable: he got to know that Fatah Khan was moving towards
Belsar, 24 kilometres to the east, to set up camp there, but also that he had
asked one military unit, under Haibatrao Ballal, to shift out midway and
take the route to Shirwal at the back of the fort so an attack could be
launched from the rear. One morning, as Ballal’s team entered Shirwal, they
suddenly discovered four groups of Marathas led by Kavji Kondhalkar, an
enthusiastic aide of Shivaji from the Maval region, each a hundred
horsemen strong, lying in wait. With Kondhalkar were and here we get
the names of some of Shivaji’s earliest associates recorded by his official
chronicler Parmanand, with effusive praise Godaji Jagtap, ‘the destroyer
of enemies’, Bhimaji Wagh, ‘brave as the real Bhima’, Sambhaji Kate,
‘deflator of an adversary’s pride and brawn’, Shivaji Ingle, ‘wielder of a
deadly spear’, the ‘fearless’ Bhikaji Chor and his brother Bhairav, ‘as fierce
in combat as the real Bhairav’ (Shiva).30
Seeing them, Ballal asked his team to quickly move to a small mud
fortress in the vicinity held by a local revenue official; once everyone was
inside, the gates were slammed shut. The Marathas chased and, climbing
up, started hammering on the fortress’s mud walls with clubs, iron rods and
stones even as those inside responded with medieval to early modern era
guns, arrows, spears, oil, and burning pieces of cloth and coal. In the melee,
Kavji broke open the fort’s gates, and the fight turned bloody. Ballal,
mounted on his horse, charged at Kavji but was struck by his rival in the
chest with a spear. Panicking, Ballal’s men abandoned the fortress and fled
in the direction of Belsar, meant to be the advance base. There was another
shock in store for Fatah Khan one evening: a crack squad of about a
hundred Maratha horsemen led by the young Bajaji Naik Jedhe a member
of the Jedhe deshmukh family loyal to Shivaji carried out a raid and
caused much commotion before returning to Purandar.
The twin surprises meant Fatah Khan had to launch a frontal attack
immediately. The Bijapur army had a number of Pathans, and at their head
was Musa Khan, with Fatah Khan himself at the rear. Among the others in
Khan’s army were right-flank leader Mattaraj Ghatge and left-flank head
Baji Naik Nimbalkar of Phaltan, both Marathas with links to the Bhosle
family; Shahaji’s mother was from the Nimbalkar family of Phaltan,31 and
so was Shivaji’s wife, Saibai. (In the force sent to attack Shahaji’s
Bangalore jagir, too, there was a Maratha Brahmin, one Vitthal Gopal.32)
The clash, which began with Shivaji’s men opening cannon fire and gunfire
on the attackers, ultimately climaxed into a hand-to-hand fight, and
according to Parmanand, both sides fought hard.33 When Bijapurs captain
Musa Khan was killed, the attacking army turned around and fled; Shivaji
lost Baji Pasalkar, the deshmukh of Muse Khore and a close aide.34
Contrary to expectations, the teen rebel Shivaji had retained Purandar.
Viewed under a military lens, the Marathas’ first encounter with Bijapur
had gone according to plan, with plenty of weaponry, gold, horses and
elephants seized after the retreating army had disappeared.35 But the victory
was bittersweet. Bijapur still had a great hold over Shivaji, with his father in
an Adil Shahi prison. Shivaji had tried to gain some leverage of his own
before the conflict against Fatah Khan, by opening a line of communication
with Prince Murad Bakhsh, then the Mughal subahdar or governor of the
Deccan. Murad Bakhsh was Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s fourth and
youngest son, after Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja and Aurangzeb. The Mughals
were at that point not pressing in on Bijapurs northern boundaries, but their
ambitions were intact; only the timing remained to be chosen.
In the event, Shivaji didn’t have to rely on the ploy of either offering to
help them or serving under them. Bijapur agreed to release Shahaji
provided Shivaji gave up Sinhagad and Sambhaji let go of the town of
Bangalore; Shivaji would be allowed to keep Purandar. Shivaji acquiesced,
and Shahaji was set free on 16 May 1649, after a period of ten months, and
promptly sent off on a military campaign by Bijapur.
Giving up Sinhagad was not an easy decision for Shivaji. His political
enterprise was new, and the young Mavale soldiers, all charged up, had
lined up behind him and defended the Purandar fort to the hilt. He needed to
keep their morale high, which would be difficult if he returned Sinhagad,
over which the conflict had erupted. Apart from the fact that his father was
incarcerated in a dungeon, there was another concern: Bijapur might send a
far bigger force to quell Shivaji. Would it make sense for the Marathas,
when their leader was barely nineteen years old and still mobilizing men
and materials, to get involved in an enlarged scale of warfare? Clearly, the
answer in Shivaji’s mind was no. The return of Sinhagad carried a timely
message for Shivaji that the creation of a new political reality required vigil,
relentless hard work and persistence in the face of setbacks and difficulties
which would inevitably arise with a gargantuan empire on one side and
long-established Deccani kingdoms on the other. Another confrontation
with Bijapur loomed, but in good time.
What Shivaji did in the following decade showed that the message did not
go unheeded.
First, he determinedly went about securing and strengthening his control
over those parts of his fathers jagir where it was still tenuous. These
included Chakan pargana to the north of Pune, and Supe, Baramati and
Indapur parganas to the east.36 This meant a greater geographical spread
even if the jagir was still being held, though mostly in name, for Bijapur
more local officials either cooperating or being made to toe the line, the
gaining of more fortresses, and wider scope for recruiting personnel for the
troops and for acquiring gunpowder materials, swords, shields and other
arsenal.
Quite a few deshmukhs had aligned themselves with Shivaji already, and
more came into the fold as Shivaji’s hold grew, but these officials, as we
have seen previously, had much at stake in the existing order. Shivaji knew
right from the start that while they would be immensely useful if brought
around, with their local knowledge, manpower and the levies they brought,
he would be making an egregious mistake if he relied on them for his army.
So instead of overdependence on the deshmukhs, he focused on building his
cavalry and infantry, and later his navy, under his own watch; all his
military personnel were paid directly and not from a deshmukhs coffers
even if their men would be told to join expeditions and valued.37
Some of the deshmukhs played truant, some frequently changed sides, and
others were openly hostile to Shivaji. Among those in the hostile camp was
Sambhaji Mohite, the brother of Shahaji’s second wife, Tukabai. He had
been given charge of the Supe pargana by Shahaji. The young Shivaji’s
response was to arrange a familial meeting with Mohite and have him
arrested; his property was confiscated, and the pargana seized.38 When
Shivaji sought to take over the Rohida fort, situated near Torna and Rajgad
which were already with him, he faced resistance from the Bandal
deshmukhs who controlled it. A member of the deshmukh family, Krishnaji
Bandal, was killed as Shivaji’s men launched an assault. The Bandals
capitulated, declared allegiance to Shivaji, and handed over the citadel. In
gaining Rohida, Shivaji also obtained a new and genuinely trustworthy
associate: Baji Prabhu Deshpande, a minister who had worked with the
Bandals.39 Baji Prabhu would, in time, leave his own imprint on Maratha
and early modern Indian history by courageously holding off a Bijapur
force in serious pursuit of Shivaji at the cost of his own life. Another
Shivaji loyalist was Kanhoji Jedhe and his family. The deshmukh of Kari
near Bhor in Pune district, Jedhe had gone along with Shahaji to the south
and had even been imprisoned along with another aide, Dadaji Lohakare,
when Adil Shah had imprisoned Shahaji. After the release of all three from
prison, Shahaji asked Jedhe to head to Pune and to be in Shivaji’s service.40
In undertaking these activities and forging such partnerships, Shivaji took
full advantage of the disarray created in the Bijapur court after Muhammad
Adil Shah suffered a paralytic attack in the second half of the 1640s.
Though Adil Shah’s wife the Badi Sahiba had taken charge, things
continued to be in a state of flux until Adil Shah’s death in 1656 and the
ascension to the throne of his successor, Ali Adil Shah.41 In the year of
Muhammad Adil Shah’s death, Shivaji struck. In January that year, he made
the bold move of stepping out of his fathers jagir and capturing Jaawali, a
famously inaccessible corner of Adil Shahi territory.
Jaawali, situated across the southern boundary of Shivaji’s possessions,
was a place where even the Adil Shah’s troops feared to tread. So what if
Bijapur was supposed to be in charge? The only writ that ran was of the
More family, the local deshmukhs. The Mores, whose surname was a
variant of Maurya, were only nominally with Bijapur and enjoyed
autonomy owing to the dangerous nature of the terrain. Jaawali was a den
of deep, dark valleys – eighteen compared to the twelve in the Mavals – and
even more remote and thickly forested than the Mavals, with precipitous
drops, unexpected chasms and bewildering gaps that could turn into death
traps. Strategically, Jaawali, close to the modern-day hill station of
Mahabaleshwar, carried its own significance: at its heights, it provided a
bird’s-eye view of the Sahyadri mountains that ran along its length on the
left as well as the southern and south-eastern parts of the Deccan; from its
depths, it opened the route on to the Konkan coastline on the west, and in its
innards, rather paradoxically, it allowed for seclusion, secrecy and a degree
of safe distance from everything that stood around it.
Shivaji had only recently helped the Mores end a family feud over
succession. The ruler of Jaawali carried the title of ‘Chandrarao’, and the
various valleys had their own individual chiefs, all from the same More
family, who reported to him. In 1648, the then ‘Chandrarao’ (Daulatrao
More) had died without leaving an heir, and a dispute broke out about who
would succeed. Daulatrao’s wife adopted a child named Yashwant from one
of the valley subordinates, the Mores of Shivthar, and Shivaji helped ensure
the boy’s smooth takeover.
Quickly afterwards, the Mores turned antagonistic towards Shivaji,
refused to acknowledge his dominance of the northern parts, and defied him
openly. Evidently they were unhappy that the deshmukhs and other Maratha
officials in the western Deccan, who’d been in awe of them for decades,
were submitting to Shivaji; some were even finding common cause with
him. Their aura was in danger of being diminished, as was their special
status within the Bijapur realm. Worse, the rival was now close to their
borders and could challenge their authority.
Shivaji had the Mughals to the north and north-west of his domain and
Bijapur to the south and south-east. If he wished to get into the Konkan, a
region in which he was keenly interested, Jaawali was key. If he took it, he
would also cut Bijapur off from areas in the western lowlands it ruled and
could stride across to the seafront. Shivaji had kept quiet from 1649,
building his strength silently and gradually without disturbing any of the big
powers. He waited, extremely patiently, for his opportunity. And it was after
a period of nearly seven years that he was now making his next big move
because he saw Jaawali as a strategic area, useful both for the expansion of
his writ and for getting a foothold in the coastal corridor.
Shivaji initially proposed negotiations with the locally ruling Mores and
some sort of agreement with them. When the Mores wouldn’t yield, he held
out the threat of an attack. Dismissively, they wrote to him:
As regards your threat of arms, we heartily welcome your proposal: Come today instead of
tomorrow and with whatever number of troops you wish. Why do you talk of having become an
independent king? Who calls you a king? You are an upstart of yesterday. You may make any
boasts in your own home but no one is going to listen to them. Come to Jaawali and see what kind
of a reception you get in this difficult region. We respect the honours that the Sultan of Bijapur
has bestowed on us. We respect his commands, come what may.42
In January 1656 Shivaji marched into the seemingly impenetrable region.
First, Hanumantrao More, who was propping up Yashwant or Yashwantrao,
was killed in a fight. Besieged, the incumbent Chandrarao Yashwantrao
fled to the hill of Rairi, a stronghold of the family on Jaawali’s northern
edges. Accompanying him were his two sons, Krishnaji and Baji. Shivaji
parked himself in the valleys for two full months, consolidating his
occupation, and asked Yashwantrao to surrender.43 The family document or
bakhar of the Mores states Shivaji wanted to leave a small tract of territory
for them, but he soon found out they were ‘carrying on secret
correspondence with the Ghorpades of Mudhol against Shivaji’.44 When
Yashwantrao descended from Rairi in May 1656, Shivaji had him executed.
Yashwantrao’s sons were taken captive to Pune, where they were found
engaged in communication with Bijapur and ‘put to death’.45 It was a wipe-
out of a clan of mandarins long convinced of its own invincibility.
Having made an example of the Mores, Shivaji took, along with their
region, the fortress of Rairi. He renamed it Raigad; from the early 1670s
onwards, it would be his capital, and he would get himself coronated there
in 1674 and make it formally his capital. Plus, Shivaji ordered the
construction of a fort alongside the Sahyadri mountains that ran along
Jaawali. It was done in a years time, and it would be called Pratapgad. On
Shivaji’s instructions, an idol of the family goddess Bhavani, an incarnation
of Durga, was placed inside the fort.
Shivaji was twenty-six years old when he captured Jaawali. He had
marked the soft launch of his political enterprise by capturing four forts
near Pune in his teenage years; for the big launch he had worked gradually,
taking almost eight years, and very carefully.
If Jaawali’s capture set alarm bells ringing in Bijapur, Shivaji followed up
by making further advances which triggered concerns even in the Mughal
establishment. One man who took particular notice of what he was doing
was Shah Jahan’s third and most ambitious son, Aurangzeb.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, Map No. 8, 592–593 and 596–598.
Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 98–99.
Ibid., 98–99; Kincaid, The Grand Rebel (Rupa Publications, 2020 edition), 48–49.
Among them was an English chaplain, L’Escaliot, quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, XV.
Both the stories are part of the Class 4 textbook in Maharashtra titled Shiva Chhatrapati (Maharashtra
State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research, Reprint, 2020), 21–23, 56.
The two letters appeared in the fifteenth volume of Marathyanchya Itihasachi Sadhane (268–269), a
collection of Maratha documents gathered from across the Deccan by the historian V.K. Rajwade in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the top-ranking historians of the Marathas
with a profound understanding of seventeenth-century Marathi who have called the letters fakes are
G.H. Khare, Setumadhavrao Pagadi, D.V. Apte and K.V. Purandare. Recently the letters were
described as forgeries by the historian Gajanan Bhaskar Mehendale. See Mehendale (Marathi), Vol.
2, 899–915.
Adil Shah’s letter quoted in Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 624; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 79;
Setumadhavrao Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji (Pune: Continental Prakashan, Reprint, 2017), 59.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 82; Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 104.
Kulkarni and Khare, Marathyancha Itihas, Vol. 1, 99.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 59; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 79.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 66.
Quoted from the Hindi translation of Busatin-us-Salatin, in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 59.
The original in Sanskrit is Pratipacchandralekhev Vardishnurvishwavandita Saahasoonos
Shivasyaisha Mudra Bhadraya Rajate, quoted in Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 639 and Pagadi,
Chhatrapati Shivaji, XIV.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 641–642.
A.R. Kulkarni, Medieval Maratha Country (Diamond Publications, 2008), 47.
Ibid.
Saqi Mustad Khan, Maasir-i-Alamgiri: A History of the Emperor Aurangzib-Alamgir, translated into
English and annotated by Sir Jadunath Sarkar (Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947), 284.
Ibid.
Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 105.
Mehendale (English), 138.
Surendra Nath Sen, Life of Siva Chhatrapati: Being a Transalation of the Sabhasad Bakhar, Extracts
and Documents Relating to Maratha History, Vol. 1 (University of Calcutta, 1920), 5.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 61.
Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 109.
Sen, Translation of the Sabhasad Bakhar, 5; Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 109–110.
Mehendale (English), 135.
Ibid., 138–140.
Ibid., 138.
Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 140–141.
Shivabharat, 151.
Ibid., 145
Ibid., 144.
Ibid., 167–168.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 63–64; an article by Lt Col M.G. Abhyankar, Director, Kunzru Centre of
Defence Studies and Research, in the special issue on Chhatrapati Shivaji published by the
Maharashtra government on his three hundredth death anniversary, with contributions by eminent
historians, 1980, 45–51. M.G. Abhyankar, ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji: A Heaven-Born General’,
Chhatrapati Shivaji (1980), 45–51 (published in the same aforementioned special commemorative
issue).
Shivabharat, 161.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 67, 73.
Ibid., 66–68, 72.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 72.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 60.
More Bakhar [family chronicle of the Mores], quoted in Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol.
1, 119.
Ibid., 118–119.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 70.
Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 119.
OceanofPDF.com
3
Notice to the Mughals
The blowback was inevitable. Shivaji knew that Bijapur would want to
make him eat humble pie in Jaawali. So, having created a divide between
the western and eastern parts of the Adil Shahi state by taking eighteen
apparently impenetrable valleys, he quickly captured the crucial port
centres of Kalyan and Bhiwandi; and further down the coastline, moved
against the Siddi rulers of Danda-Rajpuri, who were of African origin. He
conquered all except the town of Danda-Rajpuri itself and the sea fort of
Janjira, which was part of the wider Danda-Rajpuri belt and also held by the
Siddis. He then proceeded south, going as far as the southern borders of
Dharwad district in Karnataka. From there, his forces had to retreat after a
pushback from Bijapurs local commanders. But Shivaji’s ambitions of
branching out on his own were no longer a secret. With his speedily
obtained new possessions, he had contravened key conditions of his fathers
agreement with Bijapur, which forbade him from attempting to capture any
of the Adil Shahi’s possessions.
He decided to calibrate his moves. His first step towards doing so was to
tell Bijapur that new gains near the coast were for Adil Shah and not for
himself, and would be a check against the Mughals. Simultaneously, the by
now twenty-six-year-old Shivaji began communicating with the Mughals,
as he’d done previously following his fathers arrest.
The Mughal factor had become more important. Shah Jahan had returned
to his capital, Agra, after pulverizing the Nizam Shahi in 1636 and had
appointed his third son Aurangzeb as subahdar of the Deccan. Born in
1618, Aurangzeb was twelve years older than Shivaji. He consolidated his
hold on parts of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate such as the city of Ahmadnagar
that had come into the Mughal kitty, settling revenue matters and other
related issues. He also took over the town of Khadki near Daulatabad, first
established by Malik Ambar, and renamed it Aurangabad after himself. But
suddenly, in 1644, he quit his post as governor in a huff, accusing his father
of favouring his eldest son, Dara Shukoh. The following year, after the
father and son patched up, Aurangzeb was sent as governor to Gujarat. In
1647, he was plucked out from there and sent to Afghanistan to fight off the
Bukhara armies of Uzbekistan on the one hand and the Shah of Persia’s
forces on the other, both of whom were pressing in on the Mughal empire’s
borders. Through Afghanistan lay the pathway to Hindustan, as the Indian
subcontinent was termed by all those who coveted it, and Shah Jahan was
keen that intruders be repelled. Though Mughals under Aurangzeb were
forced to retreat from Balkh in northern Afghanistan and later from
Kandahar, there was no doubting the Mughal prince’s skills as a
commander, especially after another Mughal force led by his brother Dara
Shukoh faced an even bigger defeat in Kandahar soon afterwards. Besides,
during his stint in the north-west, Aurangzeb had acted as governor of
Sindh and Multan.1
In 1652 Aurangzeb was reappointed governor of the Deccan by his father.2
He was an experienced general by now, having faced attacks from the
Uzbeks and Hazaras in northern Afghanistan and the Persians in Kandahar
and having had to deal with, and put down, various Afghan and Baluch
tribal clans in Sindh and Multan.3 And he was hungry for success. As the
death of the Adil Shah late in 1656 threw the Bijapur durbar into chaos,
Aurangzeb began a campaign against both the Adil Shahi and Qutub Shahi
states. Shivaji, having strengthened himself by taking Jaawali, and seeing
the Mughals on the offensive against Bijapur, thought the moment was ripe
to hammer home the advantage.
He got his opportunity when Mulla Ahmad, the local commander of
Kalyan in the northern Konkan region, which was part of the Adil Shahi
kingdom, was called by the new ruler, Adil Shah II, to the kingdom’s
capital to deliver accumulated revenue. Shivaji struck swiftly, his men
waylaying the Bijapur commanders forces near Purandar, while they were
transporting the revenue. Shivaji’s men carried all the wealth with them to
Rajgad, while another set of men captured Kalyan, Bhiwandi and the
Mahuli fort near Kalyan. Shivaji knew that a considerable amount of traffic
moved to and from Kalyan into the Deccan, and any control over such a
trade route was bound to be beneficial. Other significant parts of northern
Konkan were captured equally speedily, whether it was Chaul, another
important port near Alibaug, Rajmachi, which provided a vantage view of
the coastal belt, or Lohagad.4 The Marathas must have taken heart from
their success against the African Siddis. They seized a few forts belonging
to the Siddis, but before they could get hold of the two major fortresses of
Danda-Rajpuri and Janjira, the Siddis sued for peace.5 Later, the powerful
Bijapur general Afzal Khan was quoted by Parmanand as saying in a letter
that among Shivaji’s ‘offences’ was the conquest of parts controlled by the
Siddis, ‘which had driven the Africans into a corner and made the Siddi
ruler furious’.6
There is an apocryphal story, perpetuated in folklore, that Shivaji’s
general, Abaji Sondev, captured Mulla Ahmad’s attractive daughter-in-law
in Kalyan, and sent her to his master in Pune. According to this story,
Shivaji apologized to her and sent her back, and is also said to have said to
her, ‘If my mother Jija Bai had possessed your beauty, I too should have
looked as handsome.’7 A far more reliable insight into Shivaji’s attitude
towards women from the enemy camp is an incident at Panvel’s Prabalgad
fort, one of more than twenty that the Marathas captured in northern
Konkan. In the fight, led by Shivaji himself, the fort commander of Bijapur,
Keshri Singh, was slain. When Shivaji went up the fort, he found plenty of
hidden treasure mohurs, hons and gold bars but also Singh’s elderly
mother and his two children, cowering in fear. Shivaji touched the mothers
feet and sent her back to her home town Deulgaon in a palanquin, escorted
by his own security detail. The bodies of Keshri Singh and others who had
fallen in battle were, on Shivaji’s orders, consigned to the flames ‘with due
rites and honours’.8
Shivaji’s focus on the western coastline was abundantly transparent right
from the hard launch of his political and military career at Jaawali. The land
powers Mughals and the various sultanates had left almost the whole of
the seafront to the firangs (the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch and the
French) who had gradually established their sway. They controlled the
movement of all ships and vessels, even those which took the top officials
of northern Hindustan and southern Deccan and their families and friends to
Hajj for the holy pilgrimage mandated by Islam. Unlike all his other
contemporaries, including Aurangzeb, Shivaji saw fully and quite early the
vast potential of the sea, and his aim in getting closer and closer to the
seawaters was to control the coastline corridor because it could yield
political, economic and negotiating power which would obviously be
useful for a rising political force pitted against far stronger rivals.
So, after northern Konkan, Shivaji swooped down on the southern parts of
the coastal belt, seizing the stretch from Chiplun to Sawantwadi, just to the
north of Goa. The ‘Sawant’ or local ruler of Wadi – in Bijapurs employ but
finding himself increasingly at odds with its rulers capitulated and signed
a treaty pledging loyalty to Shivaji. This Sawant had in his possession a
sword manufactured in Europe that Shivaji found beguilingly glistening;
Shivaji bought it from the Sawant for 300 hons. He named it Bhavani, after
his patron goddess. (Centuries later, the Congress chief minister of
Maharashtra, A.R. Antulay, would claim, in a political stunt, that the
Bhavani sword was in Britain’s Buckingham Palace, having been presented
to the Prince of Wales by the Maharaja of Kolhapur in the nineteenth
century, and vow to get it back. Historians were sceptical, and eventually,
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth herself scotched the story, replying to a
Maharashtra legislator who had written to her, that no such sword existed in
England. However, the netas stunt ended up becoming a part of the state’s
political memory.9)
The Marathas also ventured further south into Karnataka, but were
rebuffed. Still, Shivaji had made the kind of considerable gains he had
envisaged. He now possessed a big portion of the lands very close to the
western coastline, from parts lying north of Bombay right down to the
border of Goa. He had even managed to regain the fort of Kondhana, which
he had been forced to give up, much against his wishes, to secure his
fathers release in 1649. How he took it back is not clear from available
records, but the symbolism of this recapture was immense for him. He
could be satisfied that he had, in a way, redeemed his fathers, and his
family’s, honour.
Shivaji’s forces had even had a brief skirmish with the Mughal
commander of Junnar, Mohammed Yusuf, during his Kalyan campaign,
forcing the latter to retreat to his base.10 But it ended there because Shivaji
had no intention of opening up another front. At least not at that juncture.
Shivaji saw a scrap with the Mughals as no doubt inevitable since
Aurangzeb had set his sights on annexing every bit of the Nizam Shahi state
that had gone to the Adil Shah two decades earlier, and the Maratha leader
was targeting precisely that territory, especially in northern Konkan. Yet for
the moment, it was in Shivaji’s interest to put it off. So, he opened a line of
communication with Aurangzeb the first time he was deliberately and
directly engaging with the Mughal empire after a gap of seven years.
Not a single one of the close-to-a-handful letters Shivaji wrote to
Aurangzeb in this period have survived. It’s likely the originals, or their
copies at any rate, were part of the papers burnt by the Mughals after their
invasion of Shivaji’s territories following his death. What we have to go by
are Aurangzeb’s replies to his letters, which give us a fair enough indication
of what Shivaji was professing.
Aurangzeb first referred to Shivaji’s message to him in a letter he sent to
Multafat Khan, the governor of Ahmadnagar, in July 1656. He told the
Khan, who was supervising the area around Shivaji’s territory, that he ought
to ‘keep the path of correspondence with Shivaji open’ and ‘write to him in
such a way as to encourage him to offer his loyalty to the [Mughal] durbar’.
Such correspondence would make Shivaji ‘more and more willing’ to serve
the Mughals, Aurangzeb stated.11
Just a few months on, soon after Shivaji had made advances into Bijapurs
domains, he wrote to Aurangzeb once again, asking that he be allowed to
retain those areas on behalf of the Mughals. Shivaji’s idea was that this
would help him achieve twin objectives, which were obviously left
unstated: deny Bijapurs claims and block immediate Mughal aggression.
Aurangzeb welcomed the offer, as his missive to the Mughal wazir or prime
minister Muazzam Khan suggests, yet he included in it an unmistakable
note of warning to Shivaji. The clever, accomplished and experienced
military leader that he was, Aurangzeb was among the earliest to have
understood Shivaji’s ideas and objectives. Shivaji was not as innocuously
out to toe the line of the Mughals or the other established powers as he
pretended to be, Aurangzeb realized. He informed the Mughal wazir that
Shivaji’s representative had, barely days ago, approached him with his letter
stating that if Shivaji were granted mansab or land and revenue rights for
the regions he’d recently captured, he’d stick to the path of allegiance and
service and merge those parts with the Mughal empire.
‘I have written to him [Shivaji] spelling out some conditions in relation to
loyalty and service that he’d have to meet,’ Aurangzeb stated. ‘I will let you
know when he replies. If he follows our orders, fine. Else, they [Shivaji and
his men] would be trampled underfoot by our powerful army and punished
for their actions.’12
By the time Aurangzeb next wrote about Shivaji, he was himself
experiencing quite a high. Towards the end of 1656, Shah Jahan gave
Aurangzeb the go-ahead for a march on Bijapur. By March 1657, the
Mughal prince had laid siege to the Bidar fort in south-eastern Deccan.
From there, he wrote to the Ahmadnagar governor Multafat Khan, referring
to Shivaji’s ‘requests and demands’, which apparently had been made one
more time, while at the same time informing the Khan that the siege of
Bidar was going well for their side. In the following month, Aurangzeb had
captured the Bidar fort and was planning to press on to Kalyani, the old
capital of the Chalukyas west of Bidar and now under Bijapurs control.
Before he moved forward, he wrote directly to Shivaji.
Aurangzeb was at this stage working actively to get into his fold sardars
belonging to the Deccani kingdoms, and his big recent catch had been Mir
Jumla, the wazir of the Qutub Shahi of Golconda who had acquired as
much of a reputation for his military skills as for looting rich temples of the
south, melting their Hindu idols made of copper, and casting them into
cannon.13 Aurangzeb put it in writing that he was willing to formally
recognize Shivaji’s rights to the Bijapur forts he’d captured and also to the
port of Dabhol in southern Konkan, along with Dabhol’s dependencies in
the neighbourhood. In return, Shivaji had to pass a loyalty test: with
Aurangzeb headed for Kalyani, the Maratha had to provide armed
assistance to the Mughals on this campaign.14 Hardly had the ink on the
writing reed dried, however, that Aurangzeb discovered that Shivaji had
instead quickly cleared a disloyalty test: he had launched raids on the
Mughal territories of Ahmadnagar and Junnar in south-western Deccan.
Why did Shivaji choose this moment to strike? Right through 1655 and
1656, Aurangzeb had been making fuzzy assurances to Sri Ranga Rayal, the
last nominal ruler of the Vijayanagara dynasty, even offering him protection
against any attacks by Bijapur and Golconda. The assurances had ultimately
resulted in zero protection for Ranga Rayal and the extraction of a lot of
protection money from him by the Mughals.15 Shivaji firmly believed that
Aurangzeb, albeit momentarily in a mood to offer sops to him to gather
support, would similarly dump him the moment he was no longer needed.
And he had no desire to be in Aurangzeb’s camp or company anyway. He,
in fact, saw the moment as appropriate for a strike against the Mughals.
Daringly, one night, Shivaji climbed the walls of Mughal-controlled Junnar
‘with rope-ladders’,16 and after slaying the fort’s guardians, walked off with
3,00,000 hons, 200 horses, and plenty of clothing and jewellery.17 From
there his men rode to the entrance of Ahmadnagar, the chief base of the
Mughals in the Deccan. The troops stationed there beat back a Maratha
assault on the peth or locality beneath the fort, but the attack rattled the
local Mughal governor so much that he ordered all inhabitants of the area to
immediately shift all their property inside the fort.18
This was Shivaji’s first and clearest notice to the Mughals in his very own
Deccan, and it confirmed Aurangzeb’s conviction that Shivaji was not in
the game for the sake of the established powers. Shivaji was fighting for his
own free dispensation, for his people in the Deccan, for freeing the Deccan
of powers that in his opinion didn’t care about the region or its inhabitants
but saw it as a colony to be held down by force of the sword, exploited,
looted and suppressed. Shivaji deemed it all to be toxic control by outsiders,
and he wanted the place to be rid of them. His decision to carry out raids in
the Mughal territories of Ahmadnagar and Junnar betrayed the workings of
his mind, whatever he might have been writing in his letters to Aurangzeb.
Aurangzeb ascribed the surprise Maratha raids to awful negligence by his
local commanders. He scolded the Ahmadnagar fort in-charge Multafat
Khan for lack of foresight and dereliction of duty and asked the generals
Nasiri Khan, Kartalab Khan and Iraz Khan who were then with him at
Bidar to leave immediately for Ahmadnagar with a force of 3,000. Two
other military officers, Hoshdar and Rao Karna, who were on their way to
Bidar to join Aurangzeb’s campaign, were told to head to Ahmadnagar
instead. And Shaista Khan, the governor of the Malwa province of
Rajasthan, was instructed to send an additional force of 1,000 to the areas
attacked by Shivaji, with an experienced military man at its head. Thus a
Mughal force of almost 5,000 was immediately dispatched to fence off the
Mughal kingdom’s south-western borders.19
But Aurangzeb was obviously enraged, and he desired more than mere
protection of his own frontiers. The legendary conflict between the Mughal
and the Maratha, which was to see many twists and turns over decades, had
finally begun in the real sense. Aurangzeb directed at once that the arena of
the combat itself be changed. Enter Shivaji’s jagir, he told his men. In letter
after sharply worded letter in subsequent months, he spoke of exacting
urgent and utter revenge on Shivaji, though not without voicing his
impatience and incomprehension at what his own officers were doing. After
his raids on Junnar and Ahmadnagar in April–June 1657, Shivaji hadn’t lain
low. On the contrary, he had, right up until December, continued to make
swift and sudden incursions into these districts every now and then, giving
the Mughal armies no respite at all and preventing them from settling into
any kind of military or administrative steadiness.
The two big rivals were sizing each other up and testing each other.
‘Invade the enemy’s territory, don’t spare any effort in ransacking the
villages there, and reduce it to ashes. Destroy that territory in every way
possible,’ Aurangzeb told his generals, expressing his frustration over what
he considered their initially slow progress towards Junnar and Ahmadnagar
when Shivaji’s men were all over the place.20 Attaching to Shivaji’s name
which he spelt as ‘Siva’ the Perso-Arabic suffix makhu, meaning ‘one
who has invoked someone’s (in this case, the Mughal prince’s) wrath’,
Aurangzeb asked his men in another message to ‘promptly descend into the
cursed and condemned man’s areas’ and ‘pillage, slaughter and imprison
without mercy, so that the scene of devastation will trigger in his mind
concerns about the actions he has undertaken and stop him from pursuing
his aims’.21 In another letter, he underlined how ‘important’ it was that ‘the
cursed Siva’ was ‘punished’ for ‘his impudence and intransigence’. If, in
the process of the Mughal badshah’s armies razing his territories, Shivaji
stepped forward to oppose them, then, Aurangzeb made clear to his men,
‘use the sword to remove the swelling in his head’.22 After one of his
sardars, Nasiri Khan, sent him a report in June 1657 that Shivaji and his
army had retreated from the Mughal fields of Junnar, Aurangzeb was
relieved but found it inexplicable nevertheless that the general had not
pursued the Marathas as vigorously as he wanted. ‘That ill-intentioned
man’s rebellion has to be wiped out,’ Aurangzeb asserted,23 displaying a
sense of urgency seemingly lacking in his commanders. Till that happened,
Aurangzeb warned his men to be always ‘on the alert’ against Shivaji and
‘carry out a detailed probe into his activities’.24 As for those ‘people,
deshmukhs and patils living in Mughal territory’ who had ‘instigated the
enemy’, Aurangzeb suggested their ‘shoulders be freed of the burden of
their heads’.25
Early in 1658, Aurangzeb left for the north to stake his claim to the throne
as reports of Shah Jahan’s serious ill health and impending death gathered
momentum. Pounded badly by the Deccan subahdar, the Adil Shahi
kingdom had already signed a treaty with the Mughals, agreeing to hand
over several parts that belonged to it. With Aurangzeb away, Bijapur dilly-
dallied on fulfilling the terms of the treaty. Shivaji himself had launched his
first fusillade of attacks against the Mughals and was looking for time to
consolidate what he had got; he was determined to be in the fray for the
long haul, and not be just a flash in the pan or manifest a brief flicker of
revolt. He knew Bijapur was now going to look for opportunities to pursue
him, and he made up his mind, at this moment of strained relations with the
Mughals, to conciliate Aurangzeb rather than challenge him further
immediately. To reach out to Aurangzeb at that point was tricky, he knew,
but he perceived it to be necessary. Just as he had waited seven long years
to strike against the Mores of Jaawali in his first move of expansion, he
could do with a period of stability to strengthen and deepen his hold over
the areas he had gained instead of going all out at once. As noted earlier, he
considered this policy of rebellion and aggression alternating with periods
of apparent, on-the-surface compliance and restraint to be immensely
valuable: it would allow him, if indeed he could pursue it intelligently and
successfully, to steadily expand his footprint, and to survive even during
periods when he needed to backtrack. Two steps forward, one step back,
four steps forward, two steps back. He would still be the gainer in the final
analysis, getting more of a foothold than he had had when he started. And
the quiet periods would provide him valuable time to securely hold the
places he had won, so that any future challenges could be rebuffed.
Shivaji thus wrote twice to Aurangzeb, in quick succession: first in
November 1657, around the time news of Shah Jahan’s ill health first
filtered out and just before Aurangzeb began his journey northwards, and
the second time in February 1658, the arc of both his letters moving
towards submission.
In response to the first of these two of Shivaji’s letters, Aurangzeb wrote
to Nasiri Khan, the Mughal general now in charge of Ahmadnagar:
What you have written in reply to the letter of the defeated and disgraced Shivaji is approved by
the Prince. Although it is proper to extirpate that miscreant, and after his manifestations of crime
and hostility he cannot even in his imagination hope for any safety from us, yet, if he acts as you
have written to him and sends a trusty agent to you, and if you find his demands worthy of being
reported to the Prince, then you should write the nature of his desires in your letters to the Prince.
Remain ever on the alert!26
The second response was sent in April 1658 when Aurangzeb had reached
Ujjain, and it was addressed directly to Shivaji:
I have gone through the letter you sent me through your envoy Raghunath Pandit, as well as the
letter you have addressed to Krishnaji Bhaskar Pandit [a Mughal representative]. What you are
seeking is thus clear to me.
Your offences are too many and don’t deserve any pardon. But you have demonstrated your
intention of being loyal and in service and have expressed your contrition over your offences.
Ours is not a durbar that persecutes, so I have pardoned your offences on the condition that you
stay steadfast on the path of service and obedience. True loyalty is the means to obtain rank and
fortune. You must strive to demonstrate it.
You have written that if you are given all the mahals and forts and areas in the Konkan which
were part of your watan [ancestral domain] once all the Nizam Shahi territory now with the Adil
Khan comes into the possession of the Mughal Badshahi, you will send Sona Pandit [Shivaji’s
envoy] to us. And if we grant all your requests, you will send a good force of not less than 500
horses with a general of yours to us, join all other Badshahi officers in protecting the Badshahi
frontiers, and not allow any dust of revolt to be raised anywhere in that territory.
I hereby instruct you: Act according to your promises. Once you have received this letter, send
to us with the aforementioned Sonaji your letter with your demands and requests, and I will grant
those. See that you stick to the path of loyalty and don’t deviate in any way from it.27
Aurangzeb got himself crowned Mughal emperor in July 1658 after
defeating his elder brother Dara Shukoh in battle and imprisoning his father
Shah Jahan and other sibling Murad Bakhsh. As the first coronation was a
hurried one, he crowned himself with pomp a second time in June 1659,
and this time his accession was more decisive as he had succeeded in
capturing Dara Shukoh. Shivaji had, in the meantime, sent Sonaji to the
durbar with his letter, and Aurangzeb wrote back to him just days after his
second coronation, on 14 July 1659:
Know that God has adorned my banners with victory and defeated and crushed my rivals who
were enemies of the Faith On the 24th of Ramzan, the imperial throne was made resplendent
by my accession.
The letter that you had sent me by the hand of one of your servants has reached me. Remain
firm in your loyalty and service to my throne, which will be the means of realizing your hopes.
Amir-ul-umara Shaista Khan has been appointed subahdar of the Deccan. Act according to his
orders and never deviate from his instructions. Exert yourself so that the things you have
promised may be carried out in the best manner and your prayers may be granted.
I have established peace throughout the empire. Dara Shukoh has been captured with his family
and followers on the frontier of Bhakkar [in Sindh]. God willing, Shuja too will soon be
annihilated.
Know my favour to be turned towards you. A robe of honour is conferred on you for your
exaltation. Written on 4th Zilqada 2nd regnal year.28
It is clear, however, that Aurangzeb was not convinced by Shivaji’s
attempts to placate him. Privately, even after he had replied to some of
Shivaji’s early letters professing loyalty, he wrote to Mir Jumla warning
him about the Maratha’s activities. After Nasiri Khan had departed from his
district in the Deccan, Aurangzeb told Jumla, ‘Attend to it [the district], as
the son of a dog is waiting for his opportunity.’29 Similarly, he wrote to the
Adil Shah who had signed terms of peace with the Mughals: ‘Protect this
country. Expel Siva who has sneaked into the possession of some forts of
the land. If you wish to entertain his services, give him jagirs in the
Karnatak, far from the imperial dominions, so that he may not disturb
them.’30
Shivaji, for his part, had his sights set not on any robes of honour that
Aurangzeb might send, but firmly on the sea. In doing so he was breaking
new ground. As we have noted earlier, the Mughals and the Deccan
sultanates had been quite insular about the sea that surrounded the land on
all sides, concentrating on inland territories, despite the fact that the waters
were so crucial to trade and to the movement of goods and even weaponry
for states that were almost entirely military in nature. It was almost as if the
firangs as the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch and the French were
called and to a lesser extent the African Siddis on the west coast, were
given bragging rights and a monopoly on the vast seafront, with the interior
kingdoms being merely content with arrangements that would enable the
unimpeded movement of commodities, horses and other things. These
arrangements chiefly meant the grant of a ‘passport’ by the foreign powers
for ships carrying goods for the various kingdoms inland to be allowed into
the ports, harbours and creeks in the first place and for the goods then to be
carried inland.
Why almost no one linked such a trade corridor to defence and security is
bewildering, and what made matters worse for any states which were Hindu
in nature and character was the peculiar religious diktat of the orthodoxy
that it was ‘unholy’ to cross the seas. Anyone who allegedly ‘polluted’
himself thus would have to undergo a ceremony of ‘purification’, a practice
that continued until the early years of the twentieth century. Shivaji,
however, was unmindful of such taboos. He was looking at the gigantic,
untapped waters and the beckoning coastline as a magnificent opportunity
and a critical zone of state defence and security. And he had begun serious
work in that respect.
Soon after capturing Kalyan, Bhiwandi and Prabalgad near Panvel in
1657, Shivaji had ordered the construction of twenty small armed ships in
the creeks beneath these three towns. For this purpose he had commissioned
Portuguese officers, better shipbuilders than the indigenous people of the
region, along with some locals to assist them. Around 400 people were
involved in the work, according to details recorded by Portuguese
officials.31 At the head of the shipbuilding teams were two Portuguese
siblings, Roe Leitao Viegas and Fernao Leitao Viegas. Shivaji had
proclaimed that he wanted the ships, each of which would have the ability
to carry twenty people, to take on the Siddis of Janjira and Danda-Rajpuri.
They could help cut supply lines to the Janjira fort which the Marathas were
eyeing and block the Siddis’ attacks along the shores.32
All three creeks fell under the subdistrict of Bassein or Vasai, where most
of the ports were under Portuguese control. The chief Portuguese official at
Bassein, Antonio de Melo de Castro, wrote to his bosses in Goa, which was
under Portuguese rule, that Shivaji wanted timber transported to the creeks
from the sea for building the ships and was also asking for ‘an exit to the
sea via [our] ports’.33 The Bassein captain sent his own opinion with the
letter: that Shivaji’s ships should not be permitted any sort of exit. These
were his reasons: there would be born this way ‘a pirate at home’; if
Shivaji’s men seized some ships, their armada would grow; relations with
him weren’t close enough to rule out apprehension or wariness; if he had
motives beyond menacing the Siddis, this could possibly threaten the island
of Shashti to the north of Bombay; and finally, he had employed seafarers
on regular salaries, and they’d already become so bound to him that the
Portuguese were finding it hard to find a ‘single sailor’ for their own fleet.34
The Goa advisory council agreed. The order they issued on 19 July 1659
is recorded in the Goan archives. It said:
A son of Shahaji, the rebel nobleman of the Adil Shahi court, has captured the territory around
Chaul and Bassein and has become quite powerful. He has built some men-at-war (a reference to
the small ships) in Bhimdi (Bhiwandi), Kalyan and Panvel, ports in Bassein Taluka. We are
forced, therefore, to be cautious. To ensure that these men-of-war do not set sail, we have ordered
the Portuguese Captain not to let them come out of these ports.35
Shivaji simultaneously made more demands on the Portuguese. He wrote
to the Goa governors that when his men had recently approached the
Siddis’ frontiers, the Africans had received active assistance from the
Portuguese captains at Bassein and Chaul. He wanted the Goa authorities to
write to the local captains asking them to desist from helping the Siddis
against him. The Goa council debated this issue and came to the conclusion
that the best course of action for the Portuguese would be to send letters to
their Bassein and Chaul captains telling them it was ‘necessary to maintain
amiable relations with him [Shivaji] because he is powerful, has control
over Kalyan, Bhiwandi and the entire Konkan, and can cause immense
harm to Portuguese interests’.36 Another letter would be sent to them at the
same time, asking them to ‘ostensibly’ offer no support to the Siddis but to
‘secretly’ do so if they wished, ensuring that no one, least of all Shivaji, had
any idea.37 They were obviously feeling the need to check Shivaji.
Shivaji was spreading alarm all around: amongst the Portuguese, the
Mughals and, most of all, Bijapur. He had launched his most aggressive
offensive against the Adil Shah’s lands. By 1648–49, in the early phase of
his career, Shivaji had consolidated his hold over his fathers jagir, but ten
years on, he had expanded his footprint substantially. From Thane district to
the northern tip of Goa he was all over the Konkan, except for the big ports
still held by the Portuguese, the Siddis and, in some cases, by Bijapur. He
was moving southwards inland as well and had, from the valleys of Jaawali,
entered Satara district. The southern half of his fathers jagir in Pune
district was of course still with him. He’d raided areas north of that district,
in the Mughal domain of Junnar, and had pressed on to parts of Karnataka
besides, from where his men had been repelled.
Shivaji had captured at least forty forts, his cavalry had a strength of
10,000, with 7,000 using state-owned horses and 3,000 relying on what
various cavalrymen themselves brought in. He had appointed a close
confidant, Netaji Palkar, as the head of cavalry. His infantry too had swelled
to 10,000, with his other trusted aides such as Yesaji Kank and Tanaji
Malusare at its helm. The top rung of the civilian administration was being
reset. There was a new peshwa, Moro Trimbak Pingle, in place of Shyamraj
Nilkanth, who had aged (Pingle would, in addition, head the army in the
Konkan); and replacing the earlier incumbents, Nilo Sondev was the new
accountant-general, Abaji Sondev the chief of correspondence (surnis), and
Gangaji Mangaji the writer (waqnis). Individual areas too were being taken
care of: Abaji Mahadev was appointed the chief official in Kalyan,
Krishnaji Bhaskar was going to be administrative in-charge in the Mavals,
and Anaji Malkare became head of the fort of Purandar.38
However, the truth was that the threat he posed to the Adil Shahi, then still
the most powerful state in the Deccan, was very much manageable. For all
of Shivaji’s systematic build-up of forces, Bijapurs military and civilian
strength, and its expanse of territory were far wider; it was much better
equipped in terms of resources and the number of local officials it could
order or summon, because it was a well-established power. Also, Shivaji’s
forces had so far fought more or less isolated armies and acquired either
not-so-well-guarded forts and areas or totally abandoned ones. Was he
really equipped to stand up to a regular, sizeable and well-armed, well-
provisioned force?
The prevailing sentiment in the Adil Shah’s court was that the rebel
needed to be put in his place before he became a bigger threat and chipped
away further at the kingdom’s strength, and before he acquired more men
and material. And who better to do so, the Adil Shahi ruler thought, than
Afzal Khan, a Bijapur general known as a powerful crusher of enemies.
Jadunath Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib (Orient BlackSwan, [2009] 2019), 6, 9–11, 15–20.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 15–20.
Among the other places captured were Ghosale, Kangori, Tung and Tikona. Sardesai, New History of
the Marathas, Vol. 1, 115–116.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 844.
Parmanand quoted in ibid., 855.
Mentioned in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 43.
Sardesai (English), 116–117; Sardesai (Marathi), 174.
The Times of India, 13 November 1980; Economic and Political Weekly 15, No. 48 (29 November
1980); V.S. Bendrey, ‘The Bhavani Sword of Shivaji the Great’, Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts 86, No. 4482 (14 October 1938).
Letter from Adaab-e-Alamgiri, a collection of letters dictated by Aurangzeb, quoted in Mehendale
(Marathi), Vol. 1, 858.
Ibid., 817–818; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 121.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 819.
Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 1 (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1912), 217–218.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 37–38.
Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 1, 248–252.
Ibid., 281–282.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 38.
Ibid.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 825–826.
Aurangzeb’s letters to Multafat Khan and Nasiri Khan, April–May 1657, quoted in Mehendale
(Marathi), Vol. 1, 820–827.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Nasiri Khan, circa early May 1657, quoted in ibid., 828.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Nasiri Khan, circa 10 May 1657, quoted in ibid., 830.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Nasiri Khan, circa 15 June 1657, quoted in ibid., 833–834.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Nasiri Khan, circa May–June 1657, quoted in ibid., 835.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Multafat Khan, circa May–June 1657, quoted in Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2,
1143–1144.
Quoted in Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 123.
Quoted in Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 866–868.
Quoted in Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 125–126.
Quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 41.
Ibid.
P.S. Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations, translated by T.V. Parvate (Maharashtra State
Board for Literature and Culture, 1983), 35–36.
Ibid.
Mehendale (English), 191.
Ibid., 191–192.
Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations, 35.
Mehendale (English), 191.
Ibid.
Details of the appointments in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 43–44; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji,
73–74, 89–90.
OceanofPDF.com
4
Daggers Drawn
His actual name was Abdulla Bhatari, but he is much better remembered as
Afzal Khan. An Afghan noble at the Bijapur court, Afzal Khan was one of
the leading commanders of the Adil Shahi army. He was tall, imposing,
heavily built, and highly skilled at fighting important battles and seeing
military campaigns through. He had had a long stint in Karnataka from the
late 1630s, where he’d worked alongside Ranadulla Khan and one of
Ranadulla’s favourite nobles, Shahaji. He had easily subdued a number of
Hindu rajas in the south and appropriated their domains. He had been
entrusted the challenging task of fending off Aurangzeb’s assault on
Bijapurs territories from 1656 onwards, a measure of his exalted status in
the Adil Shahi hierarchy, and had done creditably despite the challenges
involved. He had been the governor of Wai, the region in which Jaawali
stood, and knew the terrain extremely well; and with that came his deep
knowledge of the fickle nature of the deshmukhs and other local officials.
He could get these officials on his side; he had the political will, the
military might and the fearsome reputation to do it.
For the dead ruler Muhammad Adil Shah’s chief queen, Begum Badi
Sahiba, and the new incumbent Ali Adil Shah, Afzal Khan was the go-to
man for tasks which needed to be accomplished any which way, with a
brazen disregard for means. For Afzal Khan could be blunt and decisive,
and he had a ruthless streak. There were many examples of how he would
stop at nothing to achieve his and his sultan’s aims. He had, in 1639,
extended an invitation to Kasturi Ranga, the raja of Sira in the south, to his
shamiana or pavilion, giving him solemn assurances of safety and
promising to sign a peace agreement, but ‘put him to death’, according to
the Muhammadnamah, an official account of Muhammad Adil Shah’s
reign.1 When internecine feuds broke out in the Bijapur durbar immediately
after Muhammad Adil Shah’s death, three senior generals were murdered in
rapid succession, allegedly at the behest of the Badi Sahiba. Afzal Khan
was instrumental in hatching the plot to kill at least one of them, his
factional rival Khan Muhammad, if not all three. He denounced Khan
Muhammad to the Badi Sahiba as someone who had gone over to
Aurangzeb’s side. This was at just the time Bijapur had found itself
besieged by Aurangzeb’s army. The accusation, though false, had its effect:
when Khan Muhammad was on his way to see the Badi Sahiba in court, he
was stabbed to death in the streets of the capital.2 Afzal Khan was, in
addition, a religious bigot and prided himself on attacking Hindu shrines.
The Portuguese captain in Chaul in the northern Konkan wrote in a letter in
1664 that Afzal Khan had ordered the demolition of all Hindu temples in
Upper Chaul.3
Shivaji was entirely conscious of the fact that for him in particular, there
was one more factor to be borne in mind: Afzal Khan seemed to nurse a
certain antipathy for the Bhosle family. Initially, he and Shahaji Raje Bhosle
had worked together as part of Ranadulla Khan’s team, but soon, Afzal
Khan had moved on to other factions. And it was he who had placed
Shahaji in fetters at Jinji in 1648 and dragged him all the way to Bijapur, to
be put into a dungeon, on the suspicion of disloyalty. Shivaji, his mother
and his father were also convinced that Afzal Khan had had a role to play in
the death of Shivaji’s elder brother Sambhaji in Kanakgiri in 1654. As a
matter of fact, Sambhaji and Afzal Khan were in the same contingent on
this campaign, but Afzal Khan had, it was strongly suspected, deliberately
not moved quickly enough to back Sambhaji up when he had badly needed
reinforcements.4
Interestingly, shortly before Afzal Khan went off to lock horns with
Shivaji, the latters father, still in the service of Bijapur, was told by the
Badi Sahiba to rein in his son immediately. He shrugged off all
responsibility. ‘He [Shivaji] is no longer under my control. I am a faithful
dependant of the Badshah. Though Shivaji is my son, His Majesty may
attack him or deal with him in any way he likes. I will not interfere,’ he
wrote to the durbar from Bangalore.5
For Shivaji, Afzal Khan’s name evoked bitter memories: of his fathers ill
treatment, and his elder brothers death. Just two years earlier, Shivaji’s
wife Saibai had delivered a baby boy, and Shivaji had named him Sambhaji
after his brother. The birth of the child was a moment of great celebration
for Shivaji, his wife Saibai and his parents, and ‘great festivities took place’
and ‘many deeds of charity were performed’.6 But on 5 September 1659,
when the child was barely two, tragedy struck, with Saibai’s death after a
protracted illness.7 Shivaji had no time to grieve, though. Afzal Khan was
already threatening his frontiers.
Afzal Khan’s boast on the floor of the Bijapur durbar on the day he
stepped up to launch his mission against Shivaji has been recorded by a host
of sources. ‘Who is Shivaji? I will get him here in chains, and I won’t even
have to get off my horse to do that,’ he declared proudly.8
Very little is known about Afzal’s family background, except that he was
born close to Bijapur, most likely, as Aurangzeb has recorded somewhere,
to a woman who worked as a cook for a living.9 Historians have surmised
that if we take his age to be around eighteen to twenty years when he is first
spoken of as a young man in the Deccan campaigns of the late 1630s, he
would be around forty in 1659. Shivaji, on the other hand, was then just
twenty-nine.
Shivaji’s chronicler Sabhasad says Afzal Khan set out with a military
strength of 12,000 horses besides infantry, but the figure of 10,000 cavalry
cited in Bijapurs official records seems more likely.10 A question debated
over and over again is whether Afzal Khan set out with the intent to kill
Shivaji. Or was he meant to get the rebel to simply submit to Adil Shahi
authority, and if he didn’t, to capture him and drag him along to Bijapur?
This is one debate on which written records do provide answers.
The official historian of the Bijapur court, Nurullah, spelt out the orders
issued by the Adil Shah to Afzal Khan:
Ali Adil Shah, on seeing that the prevalence of the Muhammadan religion was not possible unless
the bramble of infidelity was burnt up in the fire of the enemy-consuming sword, appointed Afzal
Khan with 10,000 horsemen, to chastise and extirpate that wicked man Shivaji At the time of
giving the assignment to Afzal Khan, Adil Shah had instructed him that in case Shivaji on being
hard pressed by the Bijapuri forces, in his habitual deceptive manner offered to make a peaceful
submission, the Khan must not listen to him but follow no other policy than that of flinging the
fire of death on the harvest of his life.11
Bijapur was clamouring for death to Shivaji, and it said so without mincing
any words.
Launching his ‘Mission Shivaji’ sometime in April 1659, Afzal Khan
proceeded towards Wai, the province he had previously governed. As
mentioned earlier, Jaawali was part of the Wai region, and the town of Wai
itself a flat land where Afzal Khan had decided to set up camp was just
beyond Jaawali’s southern boundary, within earshot of Shivaji’s newly
conquered hill terrain. By heading straight there, Afzal Khan wanted to tell
the Marathas that he was taking them head-on. Over a month after his
departure from Bijapur, a farman issued by the Adil Shah reached Kanhoji
Jedhe, the deshmukh of Kari in Pune district. The farman, dated 16 June
1659, stated:
I begin in the name of the Merciful and Kind God.
The whole world belongs to God.
Imam Ali Adilshah
Son of
Mohamed Adilshah
Since the beginning of the year 1069 (1659), Shivaji out of narrow-mindedness and evil
propensities has started troubling the Muhammadans residing in the Nizam Shahi Konkan. He has
plundered them. He has also captured several forts in our territory. Therefore, in order to drive
him out and conquer him, we have appointed Afzal Khan, possessed of valour and prestige, the
most capable and efficient of our noblemen … as the Governor of that province and sent him with
a most formidable army. You must therefore carry out his commands, obey him and do all the
offices of a servant, and defeat and exterminate Shivaji. You must not give quarter to Shivaji’s
men, wherever they may be or from wheresoever they may come, but must kill them.12
Here again, the words ‘exterminate’ and ‘kill’ were pronounced. There was
to be no doubt about what was to be done.
The Adil Shahi wanted to peel off as many of Shivaji’s deshmukh partners
as possible, and Afzal Khan, on his way to Wai, himself wrote to Kanhoji
Jedhe’s son Shivaji Jedhe and Vithoji Haibatrao of Gunjan Maval. He told
both of them that a Maratha Brahmin, Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni (who
would soon be acting as Afzal Khan’s envoy to Shivaji in the tense days
leading to their face-off), had spoken to him about them ‘in appreciative
terms’ and that they should join him in his endeavour so they could earn the
promotion and advancement they desired. With Kanhoji’s son he had to
adopt a particularly reassuring tone, because the family had linked itself
with Shivaji. ‘We are aware that your father and brothers have been serving
Shivaji Bhosle for some ten or twenty years,’ he wrote. ‘But you need have
no hesitation about that. You should come to our presence. You will not
suffer on that account. You are a friend of the Court.’13
Similar letters were sent to other deshmukhs, and by the time Shivaji
reached his newly constructed fort of Pratapgad on the western border of
Jaawali in July 1659, in direct response to Afzal Khan parking himself just
outside the hill territory’s eastern borders, he found that two Maratha chiefs
from the Utravali area, Kedarji Khopde and Khandoji Khopde, had indeed
already joined his adversary. Shivaji was aware that Kedarji and Khandoji
were cousins and had quarrelled bitterly with each other for land rights.
Shivaji himself had settled the fight in favour of Khandoji Khopde. But
Khandoji, along with his cousin, had still gone over to the other side. So
had some other Marathas, like ‘Ghorpade, Naikji Pandhare, Naikji Kharade,
Kalyanji Yadav, Mambaji Bhosle, Rajaji (Zunzarrao) Ghatge and one
Kate’.14 They had all joined Afzal Khan’s army comprising, among
others, generals like Ambar Khan, Yakut Khan, Muse Khan, Hasan Khan
Pathan, Ranadulla Khan (Junior) and Ankush Khan with their armed
squads when he was on his way to Wai. Afzal Khan’s choice of Wai itself
when he could have easily headed to the Pune region instead, where Shivaji
and his family had recently taken to staying in the fort of Rajgad had to
do with a Maratha chief who was accompanying him. This was Prataprao
More, one of the More brothers who had fled to the Adil Shahi durbar after
Shivaji’s conquest of Jaawali. He had a personal vendetta against Shivaji,
and he promised to impart his knowledge of the difficult and densely
wooded place to Afzal Khan so that the Adil Shahi could win it back. Afzal
Khan was at once convinced by More’s talk that getting control of Jaawali
was tantamount to establishing sway ‘over all of Wai, over the Sahyadris
and also over the sea with its coastline’, for Jaawali’s ‘secret pathways’
could steer him into all kinds of directions.15 If a single stone could bring
down a multitude of birds, why go around picking up more, he thought.
For many deshmukhs, the situation was delicate. Bijapur could claim that
they owed their authority and legal status to the Sultanate and that it had
every right to conscript them in its war on Shivaji. If they sided with
Shivaji, they’d be publicly declaring themselves rebels. Kanhoji Jedhe was
one of those who wrote to Shivaji telling him about Afzal Khan’s letter.
Shivaji wrote back:
I have learnt everything from the letter you wrote You and he [Afzal Khan] have been on
friendly terms for a long time. So go you must. But if you decide to go in person, or to send any
of your sons, first take his word of honour, and then go, else there may be treachery. Have some
good man as an intermediary and then go. Perhaps you think of going in person; and you have no
suspicion on your mind. Still it would be better to send one of your sons, with some men, after
taking a proper promise. Make some excuse or other, and do not go in person. I have written to
you about either alternative. You are wise. It is unnecessary to tell you more.16
Kanhoji pored over the contents of this note and went straight off to meet
Shivaji, his five sons in tow. He told Shivaji, ‘Your father has obtained an
oath from me and sent me into your service. I will stay true to it. I am at
your service with my five sons and all my men, and we will fight to death
for you. Let anyone have our watan then. But we will stick to our word.’17
But wouldn’t his watan be in danger if he did that, Shivaji asked. Kanhoji
replied that he’d happily give up his watan to be with Shivaji. Could he do
so by tipping some water off his right hand, which was the ceremonial
Hindu way of renouncing things, Shivaji inquired gently. So Kanhoji did
exactly that, and Shivaji’s instant response was to tell Kanhoji to move his
own family out from Kari in Bhor to Talegaon for some time; there was
grave danger to the Jedhe family, he said. Then Shivaji and Kanhoji had
milk and rice together, and the Jedhe family document records that with
their hands placed on the bel-roti (the roti and the bel leaf), they took oaths;
in addition, Shivaji promised that he and his descendants would look after
Jedhe and his future generations.18 Shivaji had tested Kanhoji’s loyalty, and
once Kanhoji had cleared the test, the leader had offered his own undying
attachment to him, a connection that he said wouldn’t be severed come
what may. Once Shivaji was convinced that someone was totally with him,
it was in his nature to dedicate himself to that associate in a similar,
avowedly comprehensive fashion; here he was doing precisely that with
Kanhoji.
On his way to Wai, Afzal Khan caused much devastation, especially in
temple towns such as Pandharpur. Merchants, priests and others were
forced to foot his army’s bill, which came to an estimated two and a half
lakh rupees a month. Afzal Khan threatened the deshmukh of Phaltan,
Bajaji Naik Nimbalkar, that he’d have him crushed by an elephant if he
didn’t pay a ransom of two lakh rupees.19 The Marathi chronicles state that
he desecrated the Vitthal idol at Pandharpur and the Bhavani (Durga) idol at
Tuljapur.20 Now, Tuljapur was not along Afzal Khan’s route at all, so it’s
unclear if he sent his cavalry there to cause devastation or had desecrated
the shrine on some other, earlier occasion, if at all he did so.21 At any rate
the Adil Shah’s court historian wrote that Afzal Khan had ordered his
troops to unleash mayhem across the territories Shivaji had seized,
including parts to the north of Wai, and had sent some of his men
independently to several areas.22 ‘In a short time,’ wrote the Adil Shah’s
chronicler, ‘the Khan made the country seized by Shivaji the riding ground
of his troops The dust raised by the horses’ hoofs of our heroes blinded
the eyes of the enemy … Many of the latter were slain and the rest fled into
holes.’23
Realizing that Afzal Khan’s intent was to draw him out into the open,
Shivaji was determined not to fall into that trap. From here on, a contest of
cunning diplomacy began between the two fierce rivals. Afzal Khan asked
Shivaji to come down to the plains of Wai, where his forces would
outnumber Shivaji’s before they could descend from the Sahyadris and
from the next-door valleys of Jaawali; Shivaji, in turn, attempted to get the
Khan to meet him in the labyrinthine denseness of the valleys.
In their own ways, they started dissembling, Afzal Khan acting
uncharacteristically avuncular after handing out a generous dose of
admonition and threats, and Shivaji pretending to be absolutely terrified at
the prospect of facing the much-feared Khan. Afzal Khan’s first, and rather
stern message to Shivaji, sent with his envoy Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni
after the rains had receded in October 1659, read:
The insolence you have lately been showing at every step has greatly upset and hurt the Adil
Shah. The territory which, after the fall of the Nizam Shah, the Adil Shah had taken for himself,
and which he later gave to the Mughals in order to establish a peace pact with them, that same
territory, full of hill forts, you, son of Shahaji, have taken and appropriated. The Raja of Danda-
Rajpuri is filled with rage because you, who have been consistently fortunate, have deprived him
of his territory. You attacked and seized the expansive lands of the Chandra-raj [Chandrarao
More], which were considered absolutely unconquerable. What was more, you took Kalyan and
Bhimpuri [Bhiwandi] and demolished the mosques of the Muhammadans there … Without giving
any thought to your own strengths, you imprisoned kazis and mullahs and posed hurdles in the
paths of the Muhammadans. The Adil Shah has sent me on this mission because of the way you
have assumed emblems of imperial sovereignty, have been unjustly sitting on a golden throne,
have arrogated to yourself powers to grant favours and punishments, and have haughtily refused
to pay obeisance to whom it is due The considerable force I have got along with me is
beckoning me to begin hostilities against you at once. Brave men like Muse Khan, wishing to
start battles with you, and sardars keen on capturing Jaawali have been encouraging me to move
forward. So it is best that you follow my orders and sign terms of peace with me, and return all
the hill forts and territories you have taken.
The great and strong forts of Sinhagad and Lohgad, the fort of Purandar and the city of Chakan,
and the territory between the Nira and Bhima [rivers] surrender all of these to the incredibly
powerful Delhi Badshah. Jaawali, which you snatched forcibly from the Chandra-raj that, too,
the Adil Shah asks you to hand over to him.24
The second message, which was conciliatory, also sent with Krishnaji
Bhaskar Kulkarni, suggested that Shahaji and Afzal Khan had been very
close, which they never were:
Your father has long been a great friend of mine. So you are not a stranger to me. Come and see
me. I will get the Badshah [Adil Shah] to confirm your possession of the Tal [southern] Konkan
and a jagir as well. I will also get confirmed your possession of the forts you have captured. I will
get for you further distinctions and military equipment from our government. In doing so I would
give you as big a saranjam [fiefdom] as you want. If you would like to see the Badshah you could
do so, but if you wouldn’t, I will get for you an exemption from regular appearance at the court.25
Shivaji delivered his response through his own envoy, Niloji Pant Bokil.
Every line of it was framed to put Afzal Khan on top of the world:
You vanquished and annihilated all the rajas of Karnataka. That you have shown at least so much
compassion for me is a great thing. Your prowess is beyond comparison, and your heroism is
fiery. You are truly a jewel on this earth, and you don’t have in you the slightest bit of
deceitfulness or perfidy.
If you are keen to glimpse the glory of this forest, please come to Jaawali and see it for
yourself. I think it would be best for you to come here. It is just the thing, and the only thing, that
will remove all my sense of fear and even provide to me a touch of glory.
Without a man as extraordinarily valiant and accomplished as you, I feel, the armies of the
arrogant Mughals and the Adil Shah are worthless. Come along, and be careful on your journey. I
will surrender to you all the forts I have taken and, of course, Jaawali too. It is hard for me to even
look you in the eye, but once you are here, with all my doubts totally removed, I will place the
sword that’s in my hand in front of you in submission. When your army is in this ancient and
colossal forest, it will experience the soothing shadows of the world beneath ours.26
A few more messages were exchanged through the two envoys, broadly
similar in argument, persuasion and reassurance, and it was Shivaji’s clever
and fluent diplomacy that won the day. Afzal Khan finally agreed not only
to go on to Jaawali but to meet Shivaji on an extended clump of a hill just
beneath the Pratapgad fort, where Shivaji had tactically moved ever since
Afzal Khan had left for Wai. The words of unstinting, extraordinary praise
and the impression of mortal dread of an intimidating opponent conveyed
by Shivaji must have boosted Afzal Khan’s confidence. But another factor
was equally at work. Embedded in the last sentence of Shivaji’s letter was
an invitation not just to the Khan alone, but to all of his army to move to
Jaawali. For a veteran campaigner like the Khan, this carried a lot of
weight. He would be there with all his forces and not on his own.
Shivaji made it clear to his men that Afzal Khan’s army must be given
smooth passage into the wooded zone. Some of the Maratha spies had
already gotten into the Bijapur camp and were relaying information
regularly to Shivaji. Soon, he got to know that Afzal Khan’s move to
Jaawali was proceeding unhindered, and that the Bijapur general was
bringing along most of his troops, but not heavy equipment or elephants
which would not be able to contend with the valley’s crevasses. The Bijapur
force set up camp in the village of Par, which was near the river Koyna,
more than 1.5 kilometres to the south of Pratapgad.27
A one-on-one interaction was fixed for the afternoon of 10 November
1659. Several terms were mutually agreed in advance. Afzal Khan would
come, fully armed, in a palanquin to the pavilion that Shivaji would build
on the flattish clump beneath Pratapgad. He could bring two or three guards
with him. Shivaji too was permitted to carry arms and to bring the same
number of guards. He would descend from the fort and extend a warm
welcome to Afzal Khan, with gifts. Shivaji and Afzal Khan could each be
accompanied by not more than ten of their courageous and trusted soldiers
who would keep vigil at the distance of the shot of an arrow. Once both
sides were thus properly primed and secure, the two chieftains would have a
private conversation.28 That was the plan, on paper.
Closer to the day of the meeting, Shivaji summoned his military
contingents from the Ghats and the Konkan and asked them to stealthily
enter the jungles on either side and stay there in a state of high readiness.
He said Afzal Khan’s army must have absolutely no inkling of their
movements or their presence, a task not too hard for the Mavale who were
adept at quietly moving in the mountains and keeping below the radar until
they could spring a surprise. If there was a stirring in the forest, the
explanation was easy: there were too many beasts of prey lurking there, and
it could be a tiger, lion, bear or pig.29 It was best not to check.
Shivaji made yet another smart move before the meeting. Afzal Khan’s
best generals Muse Khan, Ankush Khan, Yaqut Khan, Hasan Khan and
even Mambaji Bhosle, who happened to be a cousin of Shahaji’s were
with him on the banks of the Koyna. Surely the Khan himself and all of
them deserved lavish gifts? Knowing from his spies that Afzal Khan’s
entourage included plenty of jewellers who had carried their wares to do
business en route, Shivaji sent a request to the Khan: could he please send
them all up to Pratapgad, so that he could buy their best ornaments to
present to the Bijapur eminences? Afzal Khan sent them with alacrity, and
Shivaji, to prove his sincerity about buying the gifts, not only bought their
best wares but asked the jewellers to stay back as his guests in the fort.
There was great concern in the Maratha camp, and in Jijabai’s mind and
the minds of Shivaji’s council members in particular. They well
remembered Afzal Khan’s other encounters. Jijabai was with the two-year-
old Sambhaji at Rajgad, and her anxiety was greater on account of the
distance. Shivaji himself was acutely aware of the jeopardy he was facing.
On the eve of 10 November, he held a meeting of his senior council
members and told them that if he met with success, all would be well, of
course. All the same, he said, he had to give them instructions on how the
affairs of state had to be run and managed if he were killed. To his soldiers
lurking in the forest’s depths, his words were concise: ‘If, in spite of himself
agreeing to a pact, Afzal Khan doesn’t stick to his word, I will order the
horns to be blown. If you hear them, destroy his army.’30 Legend has it that
Shivaji that night had a dream in which Goddess Bhavani appeared and
assured him of success, that she then entered his Bhavani sword so as to
imbue it with her own incredible strength.31 That legend has morphed into a
version in which the goddess herself handed over the Bhavani sword to
Shivaji in his dream. As noted earlier, it was bought from the Sawant of
Wadi.
From the top of Pratapgad fort, the shamiana put up for the meeting
looked resplendent on the morning of 10 November 1659. It had a ‘richly
decorated canopy’, its carpets were magnificent, and the cushions and other
furnishings matched the importance of the visitor. Shivaji prepared himself
carefully after having bowed to the sun god in the morning and prayed to
Goddess Bhavani. After a light lunch in the afternoon, he put on a white
tunic with a sprinkling of saffron. Inside was a coat of mail. Beneath his
embroidered turban was a steel cap, and he carried with him a bichwa
(scorpion), a sharp, curved dagger so named because it resembled the
arachnid. According to some sources, the bichwa was hidden up his right
sleeve; according to others, he held it in his right hand; and according to
still other sources, it was pressed against his belt.32 In his left hand he
clasped the wagh-nakh (tiger claws), a set of steel claws small enough to be
concealed from view. Apart from the ten armed men who were allowed to
be an arrow-shot away, he would be accompanied by two companions: Jiva
Mahala, a skilled swordsman, and Sambhaji Kavji, who had previously
killed one of the Mores of Jaawali. Each of the two aides had with him a
patta (a non-curved sword), a firang a sword of foreign make and a
shield.33
When Afzal Khan started off for the rendezvous, he was accompanied by
a thousand swordsmen and musketeers. Shivaji’s envoy Pantaji Pant Bokil,
who was with the Khan, understood instantly what was happening. He went
up to the Khan immediately and asked him not to take so many military
men along when the agreement had stated that neither should bring along a
fighting unit. Pantaji argued that if Afzal Khan insisted on having so many
armed men, Shivaji, who was anyway worried about meeting such a fear-
inducing military general, would ‘head back to the fort and the meeting will
not take place’.34 So Afzal Khan kept them all back and took with him ten
trusted aides who would stay at the agreed-upon distance and three
companions who’d be nearer him. Two of those companions were arms
bearers, and the third was his envoy, Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni.
Once he got the news that Afzal Khan had reached the pavilion, Shivaji
started his walk down the fort. As the two eventually caught sight of each
other, they exchanged smiles. Advancing further, Shivaji entered the
shamiana and mounted the raised platform where Afzal Khan stood, their
aides stationed inside the tent on either side now. Afzal Khan opened his
arms for an embrace, and Shivaji accepted it, the difference in height
between the two palpable: Shivaji was a head shorter. The embrace
suddenly felt uncomfortable to Shivaji, for Afzal Khan had in a split second
held him around the neck in a tight grip; then, he had drawn his ‘straight-
bladed dagger with his right hand and struck him on the side. Though
taken by surprise, Shivaji reacted very swiftly, putting his left arm round the
Khan’s waist and tearing out his intestines with the wagh-nakh. With his
right hand he struck the bichwa into Afzal Khan’s side, and as the Khan
staggered and screamed, ‘He’s struck me, kill him at once!’ Shivaji stepped
back from the platform.
First Afzal Khan’s envoy, Kulkarni, was upon him with a sword, and
Shivaji parried the attack from the fellow Maharashtrian. The next moment,
all of Afzal Khan’s aides, the two companions as well as the armed men at a
distance, charged forward. Among them was Sayyid Banda, an expert
swordsman. He was killed by Jiva Mahala before he could attack Shivaji. A
chaotic confrontation ensued. According to one version, Afzal Khan’s head
was chopped off by Shivaji with his sword. According to another, the
lurching Khan was taken out of the tent by some of his guards and placed in
a palanquin, with Shivaji’s men giving chase instantly. Shivaji’s soldiers
first slashed the legs of the palanquin bearers and then cut off Afzal Khan’s
head. Either way, Afzal Khan’s men, highly capable fighters no doubt, were
clearly stupefied by what had just happened. The Maratha soldiers quickly
killed most of them, one after the other: Afzal’s nephew Rahim Khan,
Abdul Sayyid, Bada Sayyid, two Maratha Hindus, Pilaji and Shankaraji
Mohite, Kulkarni and four other Muslims. The assailants the members of
Shivaji’s armed guard were, apart from Jiva Mahala and Sambhaji Kavji,
Kataji Ingle, Kondaji and Yesaji Kank, Krishnaji Gaikwad, Surji Katke,
Visaji Murumbak, Sambhaji Karwar and Ibrahim Siddi, the last of them an
Abyssinian Muslim.
Soon enough, the horns sounded from the head of the fort, and as Afzal
Khan’s men, waiting in their camps, wondered what was going on, the
Mavale emerged from the jungles from all sides, falling upon them with
unconcealed fury. Not surprisingly, there was total panic. While some of the
Adil Shahi soldiers attempted to flee, several recovered from the initial
shock and put up a brave defence, but they were surrounded and at a
disadvantage in hostile terrain. It was a bloody massacre. According to a
report that reached the Rajapur factory of the English, 3,000 men were
killed. ‘All (those) who begged quarters holding grass between their teeth
[indicating surrender] were spared, the rest were put to the sword.’35
Prataprao More managed to escape and guided some others who were
escaping on the way out of Jaawali. Among those who went with him were
Muse Khan, Hasan Khan, Yaqut Khan and Afzal Khan’s older son, Fazl
Khan. Shahaji’s cousin Mambaji Bhosle was among those slaughtered on
the Bijapur side, and several others, such as two of Afzal Khan’s younger
sons, and Ranadulla Khan (Junior), Ambar Khan and Zunzarrao Ghatge,
were taken into custody.
The booty that fell into the lap of Shivaji’s men, from Jaawali as well as
Wai, was massive: apart from all the arms, artillery, tents and other
infrastructure for a moving army, they seized 4,000 horses, 1,200 camels,
65 elephants, 2,000 bundles of clothing and ten lakh rupees in cash and
jewellery.
Shivaji carried out a detailed assessment of the damage beneath Pratapgad
and ordered all the captured men to be freed and sent back to their homes
‘with money, food and other gifts’.36 He announced pensions for the
widows of the Mavale who had died in the battle and monetary rewards of
25 to 200 hons for those of his men who had been wounded, depending on
the seriousness of their injuries. If any of the Marathas who died had sons
who were grown up, they were recruited into the army; and the fighters who
had excelled were given handsome rewards.
In the cold aftermath of the Adil Shahi force’s defeat, Khandoji Khopde
was among the escapees who approached Shivaji. He had betrayed Shivaji,
no doubt, but Shivaji’s trusted aide, Kanhoji Jedhe, put in a word for the
apparently remorseful Khopde, and he was reluctantly accepted back by
Shivaji. But not for long. When he began occasionally going up to Shivaji
on his own, Shivaji, on seeing him around one day, summoned his aides and
ordered Khopde’s right hand and left leg to be chopped off. Kanhoji Jedhe
was most upset and remonstrated with Shivaji; he asked him what had been
the value of his own intercession then. Shivaji told him, ‘I spared Khopde’s
life only because you intervened. I have only cut off the hand that held the
sword against me and the leg that carried him to the enemy. I haven’t
deprived him of his watan [land grant]; I will continue it.’37 Almost 400
years after this incident, the name ‘Khandoji Khopde’ is still a synonym for
betrayal in Maharashtra.
The outcome of the encounter with Afzal Khan was a pivotal moment in
the life of Shivaji and the state he was seeking to build. Given Afzal Khan’s
record and his openly stated motive of going in for the kill, the setting, the
situation and the stakes were such that only one of them could have
survived.38 Shivaji out-thought, outplanned and outmanoeuvred the
formidable Adil Shahi commander, drawing him intelligently first into the
heart of Jaawali and later on to Pratapgad, and Shivaji’s military decimated
Bijapurs sizeable troops by making the fullest use of its strategic
advantage. As a result, Shivaji’s name entered the consciousness of all the
powers, indigenous and foreign, across the subcontinent, making the
Marathas feel that mounting a major challenge to bigger and far more
established rulers was possible, if their leadership, strategy and teamwork
held. But this dramatic and highly charged moment under their inspiring
captain also meant that the challenges to the Marathas were going to swell
further, and that increasingly forceful attempts would be made to stamp out
Shivaji’s emerging power before it could strike deeper roots.
Quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 48.
Ibid., 48–49.
Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations, 68; Mehendale (English), 202.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 1, 901.
Sabhasad, 8–9.
Ibid., 8.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2, 1126.
Sabhasad, 9; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 45.
Aurangzeb’s letter of 1656 to Shah Jahan, quoted in Mehendale (English), 200.
Sabhasad, 9; Mehendale (English), 199.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 56–57.
Adil Shah’s farman to Kanhoji Jedhe, quoted in G.S. Sardesai, ed., Shivaji Souvenir (Keshav Bhikaji
Dhawale, 1927), 142–143, published as part of Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary
Commemoration Volume, ed. B.K. Apte (Bombay University, 1975), and in Patwardhan and
Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History, 80.
Both of Afzal Khan’s letters quoted in Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History,
81–82.
Shivabharat, quoted in Mehendale (English), 199.
Shivabharat, 205–206.
Quoted in Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History, 81.
Ibid.
A.R. Kulkarni, ed., Jedhe Shakavali-Kareena [both the original in Marathi and translation in English]
(Diamond Publications, 2007), 197 (Marathi) and 301 (English).
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 46.
Ibid., 46–47.
Mehendale (English), 203–204.
Shivabharat, quoted in Mehendale (English), 207.
Quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 47.
Shivabharat, 210–213.
Sabhasad, 10; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 48.
Shivabharat, 214–215.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 50.
Shivabharat, 230; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 49–50.
Ibid., 227.
Shivabharat, 225.
Ibid., 222–224; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 49.
Mehendale (English), 212–213; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 51.
For details of the Shivaji–Afzal Khan encounter, the days immediately before it, and its immediate
aftermath, I have relied on Shivabharat, 230–245; Sabhasad, 18–24; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times,
49–58; Mehendale (English), 211–215; Kincaid, The Grand Rebel, 110–116.
Sabhasad, 19.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 53.
Ibid.
Kulkarni, Jedhe Shakavali-Kareena, 304.
Among the clearest enunciations of this theory is by a Marathi scholar and writer, Narhar Kurundkar.
Narhar Kurundkar, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Jeevan Rahasya (Marathi) (Deshmukh and
Company, Reprint, 2019), 34–37.
OceanofPDF.com
5
Narrow Escapes and British Prisoners
It would not have been surprising if Afzal Khan’s death had left both the
Adil Shah and the Mughals stupefied by Shivaji’s exploits. A world in
which the twenty-nine-year-old son of a jagirdar from a corner of the
Deccan had raided their domains with impunity, and had just pulled out the
entrails of a legendary general, must have seemed truly bizarre.
The best course was to fight this ‘menace’ together and squash him, and
that’s what they eventually decided. If the Adil Shah and Begum Badi
Sahiba, reeling from the shock of the Afzal episode, wanted to retaliate
swiftly, Aurangzeb, too, finally secure on the Mughal throne, was itching to
get back at Shivaji for daring to raid Mughal-ruled Junnar and parts of
Ahmadnagar. Dots they might be on the map, but they belonged to a mighty
empire.
Shivaji, in anticipation of this tie-up, and because he wanted to act while
Bijapur was still in shock, did not let the grass grow under his feet after
Afzal Khan’s death. Barely a fortnight later, he went deeper into Bijapuri
territory, taking the fort of Panhalgad or Panhala near Kolhapur, the
kingdom’s western headquarters, and forts around it. One of these, Khelna,
was named Vishalgad by Shivaji, a name that would, as we will soon see,
come to carry tremendous resonance in Maratha history. Shivaji also sent
his cavalry chief Netaji Palkar to Raibag, Gadag and Lakshmeshwar – all in
present-day Karnataka – on a raid. He returned with plenty of booty.
Meanwhile, an Abyssinian apparatchik in Bijapur named Siddi Jauhar saw
a chance to rise. Though he was the chief of the province of Karnool in
modern-day Andhra Pradesh, the court mistrusted Jauhar, regarding him as
self-serving and not particularly loyal. Sensing an opportunity to restore
some trust in himself, Jauhar sought the sultan’s approval to march against
the rebel Shivaji, and Adil Shah, eager to damage Shivaji in any way
possible, gave him 15,000 troops. Before long, Jauhar and his men had
surrounded Panhala, whose loss had infuriated the Adil Shah. Shivaji, who
was at Rajgad, near Pune, swiftly made a 200-kilometre dash to Panhala on
horseback. If Jauhar was going to target Panhala, then Shivaji wanted to be
right there at the spot and lead his men from the front. This he had done all
along, whether in capturing his first four forts in the Deccan hills, in
attacking Jaawali, in raiding Mughal-dominated Junnar, and in taking on
Afzal Khan. Planting his feet into the flanks of his horse and charging at the
head of a few hundred men to Panhala was once again a measure of his
personal sense of daring.
There, he found himself well and truly under siege. Jauhar turned out to be
a first-rate besieger, leaving no window open, no corner unattended. He also
enlisted the support of several underlings, among them Afzal Khan’s son,
Fazl, evidently anxious to crush Shivaji, the Marathas Baji Ghorpade and
the Sawant of Wadi, ever shifting sides depending on where their advantage
was; there were also the Siddis of Janjira, who recognized Shivaji as a
threat.
As Jauhars men encircled Panhala, Shivaji’s principal hope was that the
siege would lift automatically with the arrival of the monsoon in June 1660.
To the surprise of the Marathas, it did not. As the rain poured, Jauhars tents
and covers, strong enough to withstand its fury, carried the day, along with a
supply system the Marathas could not disrupt. It was they, rather, who were
facing problems getting provisions into the fort. Netaji Palkar, launching
attacks in vain from the outside on the Bijapur troops’ in-coming supplies,1
had to face the embarrassment of being scolded by Jijabai when he headed
back to Rajgad.
Jijabai was ‘filled with anger’, writes Parmanand, but when she spoke to
Netaji Palkar and Siddi Hilal, a general accompanying him, her tone was
nevertheless ‘soft and serious’. Without exploding, she told them in a calm
but determined tone that her ‘life’ – meaning Shivaji – was under siege, and
she would now herself head to Panhala and ‘bring back Jauhars head’,
because both Netaji and Hilal had ‘surprisingly given up all shame’ and,
instead of fighting for their leader, had ‘simply found their way back to
Rajgad’. Both offered the materfamilias their deepest apologies and
returned to the place of the siege, where Wahwah, the ‘angry, proud and
powerful’ son of Siddi Hilal, known for his ‘remarkably big and red eyes’,
fought valiantly but ended up being trapped by Jauhars men. Felled from
his horse, an unconscious Wahwah, ‘his bow broken and body riddled with
blows’, was carried off by Jauhars men to their camp. The sight destroyed
the morale of Hilal’s men. Netaji too was beaten back.2
Enter the Mughals. They were now moving inwards from the northern end
of the Maratha frontiers. Aurangzeb’s hand-picked general, his own
maternal uncle, Shaista Khan, was leading the troops. Of Persian origin,
Shaista Khan was the nephew of Jahangirs queen Nur Jahan and an
accomplished military man in his own right. He had served earlier as
governor of Malwa and contributed substantively to Aurangzeb’s recent
onslaught against Golconda. In July 1659, as Shivaji was grappling with the
threat posed by Afzal Khan, Aurangzeb had appointed Shaista Khan
governor of the Deccan. His base was Ahmadnagar, and from there he set
out in February 1660 for Pune. He didn’t go in the normal, straight south-
west line to that hamlet in which Shivaji had spent his teens. He drew a
curve, first going south, capturing fort after fort in Supe, Baramati and other
spots, and keeping detachments in all these places so the route of the
Marathas would be blocked, before turning to Pune. His forward march
went largely unopposed, and in a couple of places where it met resistance,
the Marathas were forced to retreat.
When Shaista Khan reached Pune in May 1660, he realized the Marathas
had, adopting a scorched earth policy, destroyed grain and fodder in and
around the kasba, and asked its residents to flee. The many rivers around
Pune would be in spate through the monsoon, so getting food and supplies
from Mughal lands, which lay across the waters, was going to be hard.
Thus, in mid-June, Shaista Khan moved his camp for the rains to Chakan,
about 28 kilometres north of Pune. This way, he’d still be in command, and
his troops would face few rain-related difficulties, with the troublesome,
raging river waters that could disturb the supply chain at some distance.
Trapped inside the fort of Panhala, Shivaji felt his options shrinking. But
one day, to his surprise, he saw an unusual sight. Rocky Panhala was
neither as imposing nor as broad as Rajgad or Raigad, and from inside the
fort, it was possible to see the ground below. So, Shivaji was watching
when a new lot of mortars and shells rolled up one morning. This
ammunition was carried by white-skinned men in lengthy, full-sleeved red
jackets buttoned up almost to their chins, in defiance of the sultry weather.
Leading the men from the East India Company, notorious for its rapacity
was Henry Revington, the head of the British factory at Rajapur. He had
spotted a chance to sell the Company’s mortars and shells to Siddi Jauhar
for the Panhala siege, and the Rajapur factory’s officials recorded diligently
that he received ‘a most courtious and noble reception unto the camp of said
generall, Syddy Jore’. ‘Jore’ had sent a team to ‘Collapore’ to bring
Revington to his camp, rolling out the red carpet as it were with a
‘pallanken’, a horse and ‘around 100 persons with an ellephant’.3
While Shivaji was seeing the Company’s men for the first time, his forces
had already had a brush with them. A few months before, the governors of
Dabhol and Rajapur (local chieftains whose names are not known) had
taken refuge at the Rajapur factory, while the Marathas were pursuing them
to seize three junks sizeable, flat-bottomed boats with squarish sails
belonging to Afzal Khan, after his death. The Marathas asked the British,
who had themselves been trying to recover some dues from the governors,
to hand over the junks and the governors to them, and the Company’s
officials refused.4 They said they couldn’t hand over the governors to the
Marathas for reasons of faith. ‘Wee denyed,’ the Company’s Rajapur
officials wrote, ‘being not consistent with our religion to deliver up any
man to his enemy that comes under our protection.’5 The Dabhol and
Rajapur governors then requested the British to take over the junks; they
claimed one that weighed 300 tonnes and renamed it the Rajapore
Merchant, telling the governors that ‘wee would (maintain) possession of
her till the rest of the mony was paid’.6
Shivaji’s official at Rajapur at once demanded that the British hand over
the Rajapore Merchant, which they refused to do until their dues were paid.
Shivaji’s angry men then detained the British broker in Rajapur, Velji, and a
local trader named Vagji.7 The British sent out a warning to the Marathas
that they would ‘fire the town [of Rajapur, which was now with Shivaji,
though the port and waters weren’t] about them, if they delivered us not our
broker’. But the Marathas whisked Velji and the local trader up a hill and
beyond, forcing the British to send one of their officials, Phillip Gyffard, for
talks. The audacious Marathas refused to negotiate with Gyffard; they
detained him as well along with the other two.
The matter was serious enough for Revington, the head of the Rajapur
factory, to write a letter to the Company’s Council at Surat to seek advice
on whether the Company should give away the junks in exchange for the
freedom of its men. Interestingly, ‘Sevagy’ (Shivaji) comes off very well in
this letter. Revington wrote that the Marathas could keep Gyffard and the
two others as prisoners ‘so long as wee cann have a letter carried to there
master Sevagy, who is so great and noble a person as wee beleive hee will
never maintaine this action of detenying any of us upon so unreasonable
(an) accompt (account)’.8 Subsequently, the British officials of Rajapur sent
a letter addressed to ‘Sevagy, Generall of the Hendoo Forces’, urging him to
release their officials and naming one of Shivaji’s men, ‘Dorogy’, as the
man who had effected the arrests and because of whom they had suffered.9
Velgi was subsequently released by the Marathas after twenty-five days and
Gyffard and the local trader after more than a month, and there the matter
ended for the moment.
Shivaji, when news of the episode reached him, was not pleased that the
Company’s men had not handed over the junk to the Marathas. And here
they were suddenly at the foot of Panhala, inexplicably propping up Jauhar.
Shivaji found this gratuitous meddling in his fight with Bijapur infuriating.
But he could deal with all of that later. The vital thing for him was to find a
way out of the encirclement as soon as possible. But how? All exit routes
were sealed, and Jauhar had set up checkpoints on every side.
Shivaji had never had any problem in writing letters of submission while
at the same time nursing in his bosom the deep desire and sturdy resolve to
be free. On this occasion, too, he decided to write to Siddi Jauhar accepting
submission and surrender. He said he would hand over Panhala to Jauhar
and not cross swords with Bijapur. This might seem like an echo of his note
to Afzal Khan, but the situation was very different. Shivaji had been under
siege for four months, and was looking for a way. However, as always, he
was also strategizing. He was hoping that Jauhars patrols would slacken,
and they did, a little, on hearing the news. It was only natural that they
should, after being on alert for months.
Shivaji made up his mind to try and make his escape. His personal
courage, demonstrated earlier on so many occasions, came into play again.
Shying away from a life-threatening risk was not his style. He relied
tremendously on his own initiative, on charting a path of intrepid, clear-
eyed action for his associates and followers. He had been squeezed into one
place for too long already, and the supplies were fast drying up. Leaving an
escape bid for too late might make the attempt itself altogether futile, he
believed; if that happened, the siege would remain, the provisions would
wither away, and the morale of his supporters might drop to the point of
preventing any possible fightback or rearguard action on their part. There
was such a thing as acting in time, and the time was now or it could well
be never. Taking on established sultanates was itself a gargantuan risk, and
he would be wiped out if he continued to be inside the confines of Panhala
much longer. He was convinced that leave he must, and in such a way that
he could spring one of his eye-popping surprises and declare his own, and
his men’s, superb efficacy in turning the tables on the opponents. One of the
attributes of his personality and leadership was that all his risk-taking was
married to resolute self-belief a belief in himself, his people and his
destiny. With that self-belief, he proceeded to put a daring plan into action.
The next day, 13 July 1660, Shivaji and his men waited for the sun to go
down. Once darkness had set in and it had started to drizzle, Shivaji began
his stealthy descent from the fort, on foot, with 600 of his Mavale
compatriots. Riding on horseback would have given away the game. Nature
favoured him, with the showers getting more intense within minutes:
though the ground was squelchy and slippery, and stepping into puddles
could result in a dangerously audible plop-plop, it also meant that those
patrolling the many checkpoints would be seeking cover and perhaps be a
little less agile than otherwise. In an especially tense moment, Shivaji and
his Marathas slipped past a corner near a checkpoint on the western end,
which his highly reliable spies had already identified as being the most
vulnerable. Once past it, they briskly picked up pace. They really had no
choice. The fortress of Khelna was a good 43 kilometres away, and it was
going to take many, many hours for them to get there on foot.
Shivaji wasn’t walking. He was seated in a palanquin, and men took turns
carrying him through the slush. The reasoning was that identification of the
leader would be easy in the dark if he were in a palanquin and if it came to
a skirmish with the rivals. Knowing where the leader was would help the
followers draw a ring of security around him if there was any trouble and
also not expose him to a one-on-one fight with anyone from the rival camp.
It was a tense journey. The Marathas needed to cover enough distance for
Bijapurs cavalry to have to struggle to catch up with them when their
escape became known. Even if a third of Jauhars 15,000 men came
galloping to them too soon, 600 Marathas, despite being fully armed, would
be no match.
As it happened, a couple of Jauhars scouts did catch sight of the
Marathas, and as soon as the information was received back in Jauhars
camp, an impetuous and hot chase was launched, with Jauhar and Afzal
Khan’s son Fazl at the head of the Bijapur troops astride their horses. The
Marathas were intercepted close to the pass of Ghodkhind, and a violent
fight began. In the melee, the Marathas took a swift decision: Shivaji would
start moving forward in the direction of Khelna, while a decent-sized
Maratha squad tried to block the enemy on this very narrow pass. Most of
the men who stayed back at the pass were part of the Bandal deshmukhs
contingent, and their helmsman was Baji Prabhu Deshpande. He was
probably in his early forties, and in some books and in popular imagination
he has been pictured as a bald, moustachioed man with a round face and a
tuft of hair at the back, as affected by Brahmins, though he in fact belonged
to a community called Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu, known as the caste
of scribes. Another set of images depicts him as lean-faced, wearing a small
pagdi, and sporting a Hercule Poirot–like moustache, with a gentle, trust-
me smile playing on his lips.
For hours, as the Bijapur forces dashed against the Marathas, Baji Prabhu
and his band held their ground, taking blows more severe than the rain that
now fell in buckets. In the course of his heroic resistance, Baji was
attacked, was grievously injured and died. In many tellings of this story, he
is said to have lain down on the ground, blood streaming down his
forehead, staying alive only until he heard the booming of guns from the
fort of Khela, which showed Shivaji had finally and safely reached his
destination.10 In popular accounts, soldiers of the Adil Shahi are shown
whirling around Baji Prabhu and fighting him from all sides. He’s a man
possessed and unfazed. He almost circles around fearlessly, taking them all
on, his sword clashing against so enemy swords. The sounds of the clanging
swords envelop the entire narrow pass and its surroundings, penetrated
occasionally by a massive roar that Baji Prabhu lets out in his display of
resistance. Soon the little streams running through the pass and the rocks
there, big and small, are drenched in blood the blood of Adil Shahi
soldiers, and also the blood of Baji Prabhu who, for all his superlative
effort, is suffering a hundred cuts but still standing tall, like a one-man
impenetrable army. The truth is that there is no denying that the Marathas
built a veritable wall to beat back wave after wave of the Adil Shahi troops
on that slender pass in the mountains and gave their leader safe passage.
From the fort of Khelna, Shivaji soon proceeded to Rajgad to see his
anxious mother. Parmanand notes that ‘a flood of tears flowed from
Jijabai’s eyes’, and Shivaji spent the entire day with her, giving her a
detailed account of what had happened.11 There was so much to tell about
those four months in which he had found himself trapped inside Panhala,
his daring escape, his 40-kilometre run to safety, and Baji Prabhu and his
team’s remarkable resilience in the face of the massive onslaught.
Shivaji’s escape under cover of darkness was deeply embarrassing and
humiliating for Siddi Jauhar, who was all but certain he had his man.
Equally worrying for Shivaji’s rivals was the indomitable spirit shown by
Baji Prabhu and his team. It was proof that things were changing for the
sultanates of the Deccan. Shivaji had, with his personality and keen
leadership, changed the mindset of the local people. He had imbued them
with a sense of Maratha pride, and was stirring them to acts of
extraordinary courage and sacrifice, acts that might have been deemed
inconceivable just a couple of decades ago, given their low-key presence in
the increasingly Islamicized states. The Marathas had earlier risen in
military service in the various sultanates, but always as slaves, and they
were always denied the very top posts, no matter how able they were. As
noted earlier, Bijapur had even put it in writing that the high posts were not
to be given to non-Muslims, and the Mughals had never granted any of the
highly prized posts to a Maratha. Shivaji had roused in the Marathas a
desire to be their own people controlling their own destinies and
challenging a political order that had ensured that they did nothing but the
sultan’s bidding. The Marathas were no longer accepting of the status quo,
no longer reconciled to duties under a sultan or a Badshah.
Further evidence of their evolving mindset under Shivaji’s leadership was
provided by the challenge to Shaista Khan from within the confines of the
minor fortress of Chakan. Having moved, as we have seen earlier, to
Chakan for the monsoon season, Shaista Khan thought he’d take the
relatively weak fortress quite easily. His men pounded it with big pieces of
Mughal artillery, but the Marathas, led by their doughty commander
Firangoji Narsala, held on for fifty-four days, forcing the Mughals to carry
a mine under one of the towers on the afternoon of 14 August 1660. The
mine’s blast stunned the defenders, blowing various Maratha soldiers to
bits, and created a wide opening, only for the Mughals to discover that
behind those lines the Marathas had built a mini-mountain of earth, which
they used effectively as a shield to strike at the attackers with ‘rockets,
musket-shots, bombs and stones’.12 Thrusting ramrods into the barrels of
their muskets, the defenders prepared to fight and fire afresh after every
little setback. It took close to twenty hours even after the mine explosion for
the Mughals to evict the defending Marathas. Given how absolutely
inconsequential the fortress was, the casualties for Shaista Khan’s side were
far too many: 268 killed and 600 injured.13
The Mughals had another disquieting experience. One of the reasons
Shaista Khan had moved to Pune and Chakan was his realization that
Shivaji’s northern dominions were vulnerable while he was occupied near
Panhala. Shaista Khan asked one of his generals, Salabat Khan, to occupy
the port of Kalyan near Mumbai and instructed the experienced Deccan
campaigner Kartalab Khan, who had recently successfully attacked the
Qutub Shahi’s Parenda, to assume control of the broader northern Konkan,
which stood totally exposed.
To go there, Kartalab Khan’s men and women had to descend from the
Sahyadris, and along the path downward lay Umbarkhind, a narrower pass
than Ghodkhind, near Bor Ghat in the vicinity of Lonavla. Shivaji
instructed his cavalry not to obstruct the enemy’s passage until Kartalab
Khan’s unit had entered and filled the Umbarkhind pass completely, from
its front end to the rear. The path was so horribly constricted that two
soldiers could barely walk side by side, and taking elephants and artillery
through was particularly onerous. But the Mughal force wasn’t unduly
worried; there was utter quiet in the woods, and no enemy anywhere in
sight. Suddenly, when Kartalab’s men had least expected it, there was an
eerie rustling in the trees on both sides, and the Marathas appeared as if out
of nowhere, showering arrows and firing their muskets. Taken aback, the
Mughal side and its leaders fought valiantly, but the Marathas pounded their
positions and made flight impossible. Amid the frenzied fighting, the earth
turned a flaming red in the blood of the dead and the wounded. Almost as a
symbol of the existential threat confronting Kartalab’s unit, there appeared
Shivaji astride his horse, surveying the chaotic scenes.
Veering close to collapse and with fatalities rapidly ticking up, Kartalab’s
side concluded it had to save itself from being steamrollered. Among
Kartalab’s soldiers who had fought quite boldly until that moment was a
Maharashtrian woman mounted on her own horse. She was the wife of the
deceased ruler of Berars Mahur province, and she had been given the title
of ‘Rai Bagan’ or ‘royal tigress’ by Aurangzeb for her battlefield exploits.
Rai Bagan’s real name was Savitri. Her husband, Udaji Ram, had held the
jagir of several places in Berar and had been loyal in his service to the
Mughals. When he died in the first half of the 1630s, the Mughals
continued the jagir in his then minor son’s name, but the son too died in
1658. Savitri’s grandson, Baburao, was too small to carry out the jagirdar
responsibilities, so she took it upon herself to run its affairs. The Mughals
had for long held undisturbed sway in the Berar region, but after
Aurangzeb’s ascension to power, a local chieftain named Harchand Rai
proved to be something of an irritant, and news reached Aurangzeb that he
was quite recalcitrant. When Aurangzeb issued orders to the local jagir
holder to put down the rebellion, Savitri picked up the sword herself and led
Mahurs soldiers against Harchand Rai. Her march was successful;
defeating the rebel, Savitri restored complete Mughal rule in those parts,
prompting Aurangzeb to bestow the title of ‘Rai Bagan’ on her.14
According to Parmanand’s account, it was Rai Bagan who spoke for all
her fellow soldiers in the midst of the Umbarkhind carnage, advising
Kartalab that the Mughal army had better wave the white flag to escape
what she described as ‘the jaws of death’.15 By the time this conversation
took place amid the crisis, the Mughal soldiers were also struggling with an
acute scarcity of water. According to Parmanand, Rai Bagan said to the
leader of her unit, Kartalab Khan:
The army was put into your care, but you behaved wrongly and thoughtlessly in entering this
forest, the lair of that lion, Shivaji The enemy wants to take you alive and carry you away.
You, like a blind man, have been caught in this forest and still want to fight. A man should show
his prowess only if there is a possibility of success; otherwise, what he does qualifies as rashness,
and it brings on ridicule. So now surrender immediately to that chief [Shivaji], and save yourself
and the army.16
Hearing this, Kartalab immediately sent off an envoy to Shivaji, who, says
Parmanand, was wearing his armour including a helmet, and holding a long
spear in his right hand. Against Shivaji’s waist was a sword in its scabbard,
hanging by a golden belt; against his sash was tied a large shield; and he
had, besides, a bow and arrow close at hand.17 Begging to be let off,
Kartalab Khan suddenly invoked his apparent closeness to Shahaji Raje and
agreed to hand over everything to Shivaji.18 Hundreds of swords, spears,
shields and other armour were surrendered by his soldiers; the elephants
and the horses were given away as well, along with other property. All this
for safe passage.
Shivaji had bounced back with a vengeance after tasting the depths of
despair at Panhala. He saw a window of opportunity in the southern Konkan
and felt the momentum now gathered could help him there. The Marathas
easily took the ports and major trading stations Dabhol and Rajapur, which
meant they’d get a share of the revenue generated from goods going inland
and outward. Kudal and Sangameshwar too were captured, and Goa seemed
just a gallop away. Bijapurs governor of the southern Konkan, Rustam-i-
Zaman, gave up almost without a fight. This meant Shivaji now had under
him almost the full Konkan stretch from Bassein to Goa’s borders; going
inland, his domain covered the major part of the Sahyadris, which, of
course, was under attack at that moment from Shaista Khan.
On capturing Sangameshwar, Shivaji assigned the task of guarding it to
Tanaji Malusare, among the most trusted of his lieutenants, and himself
proceeded further south. However, Malusare came under serious attack
from Surya Rao Surve, the local ruler of Shringarpur which was part of that
region. When Shivaji heard of this, he returned immediately. He had a score
to settle with Surve of Shringarpur. In the past, this local ruler had played a
double game, helping Bijapur when he saw it expedient to do so and at
times pretending he was with Shivaji. Notably, Surve had sided with the
Mores of Jaawali during Shivaji’s crucial battles with them. Reports of
Shivaji marching back reached Surve, and he fled his own province in sheer
fright, enabling Shivaji to reclaim Sangameshwar without a fresh bout of
confrontation. Soon Surve was petitioning Shivaji. He was keen to
surrender and to be in Shivaji’s service, he said. Shivaji, initially bent on
reprisal, accepted him without reserve, to Surve’s surprise. Perhaps
Shivaji’s anger against the man had been satiated by his very first act on
entering Surve’s residence in his absence. Surve had at the time made a
throne-like fancy seating arrangement for himself in his fief, where he was
in the habit of receiving visitors. Shivaji had taken one look at it and,
ferocity in his eyes, kicked it to the ground in a display of high indignation.
Along with the extravagant chair, the anger too had gone.19
However, Shivaji had not forgotten the sight of the British East India
Company rolling in grenades during the siege of Panhala, or the saga of
Afzal Khan’s junks. After subduing Surve, he entered Rajapur, where it had
all played out, and where the Company’s factory was located, and decided
both to penalize the Englishmen there and to assert his dominance over the
town, which according to Shivabharat was ‘a wealthy emporium’, with ‘the
merchandise of Arabia, Persia, Egypt, Africa, China, Europe imported
there for sale’.20
Shivaji promptly asked the English officials in Rajapur to call on him, and
the moment they did so, he ordered that they be placed in fetters. In all,
eight British men were arrested, among them Henry Revington, the
factory’s chief official, Randolph Taylor, another official who was slated to
succeed Revington as head of the factory, a medical surgeon named Robert
Ward, and Phillip Gyffard, who had previously been detained by the
Marathas for over a month during the affair of the junks. The Dutch, who
had their base in Vengurla nearby, recorded that the British East India
Company’s Rajapur factory was ‘entirely stripped’ by Shivaji’s men, ‘even
the floor being dug up in search of hidden treasure’.21 Pointing to the
reasons behind Shivaji’s actions, the Dutch noted that the British had
‘received no compensation for the munitions of war which they lent to the
King of Bijapur for use against Shivaji, but they have suffered great damage
from that rebel on their account’.22 The Marathas, they added, ‘also
plundered many foreign merchants, who yearly bring goods to Rajapur
from Persia and Muskat’.23
The British East India Company was at the time a nascent power and far
from being the force it eventually became in the eighteenth century. Though
Jahangir had given it permission in 1618 to build a trading station or factory
in Surat, it was only eight years later that it established its first fortified hub
on the Coromandel coast; that, too, had been wound up by 1632. The
Madras settlement came up soon thereafter, becoming a major centre, and
so did Rajapur and other trading stations, though Surat remained the heart
of its operations along the western coast. When the British prisoners of the
Marathas were moved inside the Rairi fort in 1662, Charles II got the island
of Bombay as a dowry gift from the Portuguese, but so obscure was this
island that for some time the East India Company’s officials in London
were wondering where exactly it was, some even making the guess that it
was ‘somewhere near Brazil’.24 Hardly anyone would have realized in the
1660s that the Portuguese and Dutch powers would lose their might almost
completely in the future and the British East India Company would become
the predatory global corporation that it turned out to be.
Some of the arrested British officials were confined by the Marathas
inside the fort of Songad near Pen in the Konkan and the others at the fort
of Wasota, a little further inland. Shivaji directed one of his officials, Raoji
Somnath, to take charge of Rajapurs affairs and to watch over the captured
Company officials. Soon Raoji Somnath communicated to the arrested men
that they would be released if the British agreed to assist Shivaji in his
campaign against the Siddis of Janjira.25 Their immediate answer was that
the Company would offer no such assistance, but as time went by and it
became increasingly clear that liberty would not be so easily obtained, they
began to dangle the carrot of possible support in this regard.
The British, led by Revington, wrote to their Surat Council, suggesting
specific ‘proposals’ they should make to Shivaji. First, Shivaji ‘should grant
the prisoners their liberty, and restore what has been taken from them’.26 If
both things were not possible, he must restore ‘at least our liberty’, they
emphasized. The British would back his campaign against Janjira, and he
should pay for the English ships assisting the Marathas there. The Company
should charge more for the ships than he’d be willing to pay, perhaps
‘10,000 pagodas for each of four ships’, and demand all the money in
advance. In short, a bait should be put out but difficult demands made so
Shivaji himself would back off.
Plus, Shivaji must give the Company ‘a convenient port town, with liberty
to build a fort, he providing the labour and materials’. Shivaji’s ‘Braman at
Rajapore’ had promised the Company a ‘handsome seat, called Meate
Bunder, upon the coast’. Meeth, which the British wrote as ‘Meate’, is salt
in Marathi; it suggests the offer was of a salt port. But Shivaji must also
‘allow the English to receive half the customs revenue of that town, their
own imports and exports being duty free’. And he must permit the British to
establish a mint for silver coins and to buy saltpetre freely, apart from
granting a warehouse in the port town he’d give.
There was every possibility that Shivaji wouldn’t consent to any of this.
‘Being a perfidious man himself’, wrote the Englishmen, who had not too
long ago praised him as ‘noble’, ‘he may doubt whether the English will
perform their promises, once he has released the prisoners. The answer
should be that as the grant of a town (etcetra) is to be contingent on the
English carrying out their contract, it would be more reasonable to expect
security from him.’
And ‘if he should be insolent’, the imprisoned Englishmen observed, there
were always threats that could be issued to him. They had already let it be
known that if they weren’t released, Surat officials would grant ‘Oranzeebs
[Aurangzeb’s] desire in transporting an army into Decan’. So far they had
desisted from doing so because they were friends with the Badi Sahiba of
Bijapur, but now she too was deposed and gone. Another threat to be made
was a British offer to help ‘Shasta Ckaune’ (Shaista Khan). The offer
‘would be very acceptable to’ the Khan ‘and then Sevagi may be soon
routed’.
One thing Revington and his co-prisoners were convinced about, and this
they communicated to the Surat Council. The Janjira castle was ‘the only
aim’ Shivaji had, and if he were persuaded to believe the word of the
British, ‘he would be real to us, therefore, whoever comes to him must
make it his business to persuade him to believe us’.27
The Surat Council, in response to Revington’s urging, wrote what it
termed as ‘many persuasive letters’ to Shivaji for the release of the
prisoners, ‘yet they would not be taken notice of’.28 Finally, the ill health of
one official, following upon the death of another, changed things.
A month after the arrest of the eight British men, one of them, Richard
Napier, had died. The Dutch Batavia Dagh Register recorded that he died of
torture, but the British letters, which were not censored, make it evident that
it was a natural death. Napier, according to British documents, ‘came out of
England a mellencholly [melancholy] person, and so continued’. He was
‘dangerously ill, and not expected to live’, and he passed away ‘about a
month since in Rajahpore’, that is, before the English prisoners were moved
out elsewhere.29 Later that year, Revington himself fell gravely ill. From the
start he appeared to have been uncomfortable at Songad and had begged to
the Surat officials ‘for some shirts, breeches, and cotton waistcoats’, and
also ‘a small tooth comb, for among 170 prisoners he cannot himself so
clean as he would do’.30 ( There were other prisoners lodged there too.)
Around September or early October he came down with ‘dropsey’, which
‘caused a feare of his death’.31 He was let out by the Marathas along with
his surgeon and returned to Surat, ‘in a weake condition’, on 17 October
1661; never recovering fully, he died in December that year.32
Shortly afterwards, the six British men who still remained imprisoned sent
three desperate letters to the Surat officials, saying they should pay the
Marathas whatever ransom they demanded and obtain their freedom. They
did not get much sympathy.
In his reply of 10 March 1662, Andrews, president of the Surat Council,
referred to the three letters and said the Council had its hands full with
business and didn’t want to spend time ‘unnecessaryly in inditing and
sending costly letters to a rogue that takes no notice of them’. Besides, the
arrested officials seemed to have rubbed Surat the wrong way with some
intemperate language. The Council chief referred to this with serious
disapproval and underscored the fact that the prisoners had themselves to
blame for their current predicament:
How you came in prison you knowe very well. ’Twas not for defending Companies goods; twas
for going to the Seige of Pannella and tossing balls with a flagg that was knowne to bee the
Englishes It [Shivaji’s action] was but as any other would doe, having power to revenge
himself of such affronts; for marchants are not to sell their goods, when if of that nature as
granadoes, to goe and shoote them off against an enemy; for marchants while trading in a strainge
country one may live quietly; if not, medling, must looke for a requitall of their deserts. Wee must
tell you plainly that none but what rehearsed is the cause of your imprisonment; Mr Revington
himself having mentioned the commands of Sevagee not to sell any.33
Despite this reproach, the president of the Surat Council did dispatch one
letter to Shivaji and another to the Adil Shah of Bijapur, warning the
captives simultaneously that if the ransom demanded were too big, ‘wee
have it not to spare’.34 If the letters didn’t work, it was proposed to ‘employ
force, by blockading the coast towns and seizing any vessels coming from
Mokha or Persia’. It was pointed out that the queen of Bijapur, who had
gone to Mecca, was set to return, ‘and if it bee our good fortune to light on
hir, surely the King will not faile to procure your release for hir’.35 Shivaji
still didn’t send any reply, so on 21 July 1662 a consultation took place at
Surat, and two British East India Company ships, the Royal Welcome and
Hopewell, were instructed to go to Goa or some adjacent port for the
monsoon and seize junks returning from Mokha. One of the ships,
Hopewell, was advised ‘to cruise off Rajapur and Kharepatan, while the
other watched Vengurla, Dabhol, and the neighbouring harbours’. They
were ordered to seize any ships belonging ‘to any Decan people, either to
the Kinge of Decan, Sevagy, or any marchants of the country’. The
blockade should continue until 20 September, the ships’ commanders were
told, when both ships were to proceed to Karwar to fetch the pepper
accumulated there. And a particular watch was to be kept for the ‘Queen of
Decan’, who, if captured, was to be brought to ‘Swally’ (Suvali), with care
taken to ‘use hir with all the respect requisite to bee showed soe eminent a
person’.36
Meanwhile, the English prisoners were moved by Shivaji’s men to the fort
of Rairi or Raigad. Neither the Badi Sahiba nor any ships of the Deccan
were intercepted and seized by the Company’s vessels. Negotiations with
the Marathas dragged on for months, and Raoji Somnath, asked to supervise
the captives, was himself away carrying out other responsibilities in
Shivaji’s other regions. He returned to Rairi on 17 January 1663, took the
prisoners to Rajapur, and released them. The Surat Council, and the
prisoners themselves, wanted reparations, but Shivaji wouldn’t give any.
What he did issue was a message carrying his seal. Read out to them at the
time of their release in Rajapur, it said, ‘Let us forget the past. We had on
hand a war with Bijapur for which funds were needed, and so Rajapur had
to suffer. We shall not repeat the affair.’37
Shivaji was responding to the British in a specific context, and in that
context, as is unmistakable from the records available, he didn’t budge an
inch. He was hostile to the extent that the British would later remark that he
saw them as inveterate enemies. But the Marathas naturally also looked at
the British as traders whose business could yield the emerging Shivaji-led
power decent tax and customs revenue as their goods moved back and forth.
That is why Shivaji momentarily spoke of forgetting the past. The British
East India Company too did not barring the blockade idea take any
provocative action against the Marathas during this episode at least, despite
the urgings of the imprisoned officials.
Though the Englishmen later restarted their trade at Rajapur, one of the
officials sent to Surat an estimate of the losses the Rajapur factory had
suffered. ‘Shivaji’s raid on Rajapur cost it in plunder the amount of 24,000
hons, the death of two persons and the detention of the factors for two
years,’ the official stated.38 For long after the end of this episode, the British
pressed Shivaji for reparations for the damages caused by the Maratha raid
at Rajapur. He refused to yield beyond a point until the last, convinced he
had done the right thing.
Some Maratha historians have cited this encounter with the British as
proof of Shivaji having recognized right from the beginning the threat
posed by the East India Company to the country, and its sinister motives. In
popular fictional accounts, such as the play Jaanta Raja, Shivaji is shown
ordering the imprisonment of the Englishmen at Rajapur and saying
outright that ‘these Englishmen say they are mere traders, but we need to be
wary of them, because their real aim is conquest of the land’.
That’s a classic case of reading history backwards. It is no one’s
contention that certain dangers were not apparent. For example, it was
known to the Marathas, and indeed to other powers in the land, that the
English would want to have fortifications of their own. That was why, when
the incarcerated British men told a Maratha official whom they described
simply as ‘the Braman at Rajahpore’ that they should be released so they
could offer some genuine help with the desired occupation of Janjira, his
retort was that ‘if we [the Englishmen] were not in his hands, our men
would enter the [Janjira] Castle first, and keep it for themselves’.39 Yet such
fortifications were being built by all, and certainly by the Portuguese and
the Dutch, who were much more powerful in that period than the British.
And as mentioned earlier, Shivaji was looking at the British in a certain
context.
Shivaji knew he would encounter the British East India Company again in
the future, and also the other foreign powers such as the Dutch and the
Portuguese. But that was if he could first somehow get the better of
Aurangzeb’s maternal uncle. That was going to be a significant challenge.
Shaista Khan appeared to have got a firm grip on much of the Sahyadri belt
and on the situation: he was already comfortably ensconced in the very
home in which Shivaji had spent so many of his formative years.
Sardesai, History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 131.
Shivabharat, 290–294.
English Factory Records quoted in Bal Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2 (D.B. Taraporewala Sons &
Co., 1932), 71.
English Records on Shivaji, 4.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 9.
While the highly trustworthy Jedhe Chronicle simply says Baji Prabhu laid down his life and his men
did not allow Jauhar to ascend the pass, the post-Shivaji era 91 Kalmi Chronicle states that he took
his last breath only after he heard the gunfire from the fort of Khelna. All three have been quoted in
Mehendale (English), 236.
Shivabharat, 307–308.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 63.
Ibid., 63.
Mehendale (English), 242; B.M. Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Uttarardha [Part 2] (Purandare
Prakashan, Pune, 2018 edition), 339–340.
Shivabharat, 324.
Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History, 117.
Ibid., 325–326.
Ibid., 327.
B. M. Purandare, Raja Shiv Chhatrapati, Purvardha [Part 1] (Purandare Prakashan, Pune, 2018
edition), 430–431.
Quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 132.
Ibid., 133.
Ibid., 132.
Ibid.
Quoted in William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
(Bloomsbury, 2019), 22.
Sardesai, A New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 141.
This and all the other suggestions mentioned in William Foster, English Factories in India, 1661–
1664 (Clarenden Press, 1923), 6–7.
English Records on Shivaji, 32.
Ibid., 34.
Foster, English Factories in India, 3; English Records on Shivaji, 27.
Foster, English Factories in India, 8–9.
English Records on Shivaji, 34.
Mehendale (English), 699.
English Records on Shivaji, 37; Foster, English Factories in India, 87; Sardesai, A New History of
the Marathas, Vol. 1, 142.
Foster, English Factories in India, 87–88.
Ibid., 88.
English Records on Shivaji, 40; Foster, English Factories in India, 88.
Sardesai, A New History of the Marathas, Vol. 1, 142.
Ibid.
English Records on Shivaji, 23–30.
OceanofPDF.com
6
The Nocturnal Strike
Shaista Khan, the amir-ul-umra and subahdar of the Deccan, was living the
aristocratic life in Lal Mahal, Shivaji’s own dwelling of his teenage years.
Despite the ‘Mahal’ in its name, the single-storey house in Pune, with its
straight-backed stone walls, was a nondescript and no-frills one. Shaista
Khan and his attendants had turned it into as much of a picture of Mughal
wealth as they possibly could. With the serious limitations of its Deccani
plainness, though, they couldn’t go very far, considering the very high
levels of Mughal opulence, where white marble pavilions and canopies of
gold were common.
Shaista Khan had got an open door leading to the kitchen covered
completely, so that the sometimes overpowering trail of smells and the
noise of the cooks did not breach the quiet cosiness of the inner chambers.
In those chambers, he had got a number of bolsters placed, so that he could
lean against them comfortably while holding a conversation with his
officials or women from his harem, and look out of the open balcony
whenever he wished to survey the surrounding mountainside, in style. He
had also built what the Mughals described as a series of tents within. They
weren’t actually tents but layer upon layer of curtains, piled high. There
were seven such layers in all, leading up to Shaista Khan’s private
bedchamber, so that his privacy, when he was in the company of any of his
women, was perfect and undisturbed. And right at the heart of his chamber
he had constructed a water tank, a mini-fountain as it were, to make up for
the dearth of Mughal magnificence in that place, so that he could bear the
heat and dust of Lal Mahal with equanimity and keep away any flies that
swirled around.
Luxury did not distract him, however, from his given task of piling on the
pressure on Shivaji. Shaista Khan combined comfort and conscientious
Mughal duty almost effortlessly. With him in charge, the people in Shivaji’s
domains were, in the words of Shivaji’s chronicler, Parmanand,
‘frightened’.1 Shaista Khan had stopped trying to break into Shivaji’s forts
after the unexpected difficulties he’d faced at Chakan, but on the ground,
entire villages and men, women, their houses, belongings and their cattle
were game for the Mughals. In Pune itself, the Marathas had, as we have
seen, adopted a scorched earth policy, but elsewhere, the inhabitants had
nowhere to hide.
An incident cited in a Persian document from Aurangzeb’s reign illustrates
the nature of Shaista Khan’s deadly swoops:
News was received that the villages belonging to the wretched enemy [Shivaji] were situated at
the foot of Lohgad and other forts situated about forty miles away from Poona. The subahdar
[Shaista Khan] sent Naamdar Khan [a general who was the son of another Mughal general, Jaffar
Khan] and other mansabdars on Thursday the Eleventh in the direction of these villages. Naamdar
Khan reached these villages the same day. He set on fire about seventy or eighty roadside villages.
He destroyed grain and other material. He then halted at the foot of the fort of Tikona. The
inhabitants of the villages had taken their cattle and goods to the hills. Naamdar Khan halted at
the place for the next day. He sent his colleagues in pursuit of the inhabitants. They went up the
hills and captured about one thousand cattle and three hundred men and women. On the third day,
Naamdar Khan left the place. He set fire to villages situated between the forts Tikona, Lohgad,
Isapur and Tungi. He then returned.2
Shivaji was well aware of this attack on lives and livelihoods. He wrote to
his local officials with specific instructions on what they should do to
protect the local people and what the ordinary peasants themselves should
do to secure their safety. His letter to Sarjerao Jedhe, one of his trusted
deshmukhs from Rohid Khore in the Mavals, offers insight into his
thinking:
Shaka 1584 Kartik Va. [Vadya] 7 [23 October 1662]
‘Mahadev’ Mu. [Mudra] Va. [Vadya] See. [Seema]
Ra. [Rajashree] Shivaji Raje to Sarjerao Jedhe Deshmukh, Ta [Tarf or tapa, for region] Rohid
Khore
Jasood [jasoos in Hindi or spies] have brought in information that the Mughals are going to raid
your tapa [taluka or subdistrict]. As soon as you get this letter, you must send out warnings to all
the villages in your tapa and, gathering all of the residents, along with their lekrey-baale
[children; the expression can be termed the Marathi equivalent of the Hindi bal-bacche], send the
peasant people to a strong and secure spot beneath the ghats. The spot should be such that it’s safe
from the enemy’s attacks. Don’t be lax, and act immediately. If the Mughals take away any
captives owing to slackness on your part, the whole fault will lie with you. So bear in mind that
you will carry the sin. Go across all the villages, work day and night, and take everyone below the
ghats. Don’t delay things for even a moment, and be absolutely on your guard. Some people may
stay back to look after their fields. They should be told to find very safe spots on the hills and
mountains, and if they spot the enemy at a distance, to flee in the direction opposite to where the
enemy’s headed. For your part, you must be extremely vigilant.3
Shivaji tried to retaliate against the Mughals in his own way. But the
results were mixed. He himself led a force to Pen to attack Naamdar Khan,
who had been among the most ruthless of Shaista Khan’s generals. ‘The
Raja went in person to Mira Hill and made a surprise attack on Naamdar
Khan,’ the Jedhe Chronology states.4 One of Shivaji’s lieutenants, Waghoji
Tupe, and several other Marathas were wounded in this encounter, and
many died. Among the dead was Krishnaji Babaji, who’d been appointed
governor of Jaawali by Shivaji after he’d taken it from the Mores.5 Shivaji
also deployed Netaji Palkar to cut off supplies, take away provisions and
cause as much damage in the Mughal camp as possible; but far from doing
any damage, he barely escaped with his own life.
Not all Maratha attempts were futile. When a Mughal general, Bulakhi,
besieged the fort of Deiri in the Konkan, Kavji Kondhalkar, who had
splendidly repulsed the challenge of Fatah Khan in Shivaji’s first major
battle near Pune in 1648, ‘went there, killed 400 men and broke the siege’.6
All these moves were, in the end, going to be temporary. The skirmishes,
whenever they did take place, were small, their effect was not widespread
and often favourable to the Mughals, and the Maratha retaliatory raids were
at best minor, patchwork measures. They weren’t going to make Shaista
Khan go away.
There was also no way Shivaji’s army could fight pitched battles against
Shaista Khan’s men. The numbers were grossly disproportionate and, if the
need arose, the Mughal general could summon plenty more men and arms
from Gujarat, Rajasthan and elsewhere. Shaista Khan eventually did just
that by calling in Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur and his contingent in
the middle of his Deccan campaign; this was something the Marathas
simply didn’t have the wherewithal to do. Also, Shaista Khan had reached a
point where he had more or less occupied all of the territory Shivaji had
won over the past decade and a half, leaving just a little bit at the southern
end of the Sahyadris for him; to this Shivaji had now added the Bijapur part
of the southern Konkan, which was almost all of the southern coastal belt
up to the Goa border.
In order to focus on the looming threat from Shaista Khan, meanwhile,
Shivaji had also given up Panhala. He had first thought he could end the
siege of the fort, but soon realized it was futile to try. Furious at Shivaji’s
escape in the dead of night, the Adil Shah had taken control of the siege
himself. He believed Siddi Jauhar had taken money from the Marathas and
deliberately allowed Shivaji an opening. (Jauhar, poisoned to death on his
return to Karnool, had to pay with his life for this mistrust.) Recognizing
that the encirclement of Panhala was too strong to be breached, Shivaji told
his men to give up the fort and focus elsewhere. It wasn’t wise to fight on
two fronts, against Bijapur as well as against the Mughals, he said in his
message to Trimbak Bhaskar – whom he had appointed in-charge of the fort
– advising the surrender of Panhala.7
With this retreat, Shivaji was also hoping for a thaw in the chill that had
set in between Bijapur and him, since he didn’t want to keep looking
constantly over his shoulder while responding to Shaista Khan. Once
Panhala was given up, there was indeed a modest thaw, which was more a
setting of basic rules of engagement for the moment so that the threat of the
Mughal empire which loomed over all of Deccan and especially so for
Bijapur, which was hit by tremendous durbari disorder could be dealt
with.8
But Shaista Khan had proven too difficult to handle for any such
adjustment with Bijapur to have any real effect. Shivaji was faced with the
most daunting challenge of his career so far, a challenge far more weighty,
grim and problematic than the ones posed by Fatah Khan, the Mores of
Jaawali, Afzal Khan and Siddi Jauhar. And he had another worry to contend
with: Shaista Khan was winning over some officials of the fledgling
Maratha order. To a couple of his officials, a palpably concerned Shivaji
wrote on 3 April 1663:
News has arrived from Sinhagad that there has been some fitva [betrayal] there, so for the
moment we are not proceeding to the Konkan against Naamdar Khan as originally planned. You
should leave for the fort of Sinhagad as soon as you get this letter, with your military troops and
your infantry. And on the fort itself, be very alert and vigilant. Find out who all have committed
treachery and write to me. Take along Tanhaji Naik and Kondaji Naik and Kamloji Naik and
Darekar and Rumaji Ahira and Gondaji Pandhra, and each one of you practise the greatest
vigilance on Fort Sinhagad. Set apart the men involved in the treachery from the ones you’re
taking along.9
How was Shivaji going to get through this most difficult of trials that
presented itself in the form of Shaista Khan and his army?
In the Maharashtrian historical imagination, and in the ever-burgeoning
literature on Shivaji in Marathi, what happened next was near inevitable.
According to this teleological approach, Shivaji was the sole driver of
events, and he took them to predestined conclusions. The truth, on the
contrary, was that Shivaji had suffered setback after grave setback for
almost three straight years and was staring at a crisis which, if not
surmounted, would spell the end of his ambitious enterprise to carve out a
kingdom in the Deccan. He’d been driven out of almost all the areas he had
made his own. His men, who had occasionally caused disturbances in the
enemy camp, had been chased away, some were succumbing to Shaista
Khan’s offers, and without any major military battle to speak of, the
Marathas appeared to have been considerably weighed down by the sheer
unrelenting pressure of Mughal might. With his possession of vast tracts of
land and his reserves of patience, Shaista Khan was on top of the situation
and was truly establishing himself – as his title amir-ul-umra suggested – as
the ‘premier prince’ of the Mughals, over and above his rank of subahdar
of the Deccan.
Shivaji gave the matter a lot of thought and came up with the ingenious
and extraordinary idea of personally mounting an attack on Shaista Khan.
That, too, not in any field of battle, nor from any safe battlement of his own
in the hills, but inside Lal Mahal. He made up his mind to hunt down the
well-defended and cloistered general inside the very house in which he was
holed up.
This plan was very different from the one he had hatched to defeat Afzal
Khan. Afzal was lured, cleverly, into the hills, and Shivaji had arranged a
meeting with him at a vantage point. Shaista Khan, on the other hand, had
expelled Marathas from their territory. In Lal Mahal, the Khan had ring-
fenced himself three times over. How was Shivaji even going to reach him?
Shaista Khan’s outermost layer of security covered Pune on all sides, the
troops at least 10,000-strong. The second layer was inside the kasba of
Pune. The entire town was effectively Shaista Khan’s camp and now his
military and administrative headquarters. Gaining entry would be very
tough, and getting closer to Lal Mahal, where he was staying, even tougher.
And even if Shivaji and his Marathas somehow reached the doorstep, how
were they going to breach the security cover there? What, moreover, would
happen if Shivaji, leading the charge himself, was caught? It would surely
mean the end of him, an ignominious end. The jeopardy was too great, and
the gamble almost not worth it. Except in Shivaji’s mind. He was mentally
mapping out the possibilities and determining the details. Many might have
dismissed it as an act of insanity or a dive into disaster, but Shivaji, while
very alert to the danger involved, was contemplating means by which the
blood of Shaista Khan, just like that of Afzal Khan, could be somehow
spurted out on to the Deccan soil. That was the only way he could win, the
Marathas could win. To that end, he was firing himself up and firing up
his men too.
According to the Mughal historian Khafi Khan, whose father served in
Shaista Khan’s army, the amir-ul-umra had, after having lodged himself in
the house ‘built by that hell-dog Sivaji’, issued orders that ‘no person,
especially no Mahratta [Maratha] should be allowed to enter the city [of
Pune] or the lines of the army without a pass, whether armed or unarmed,
excepting persons in the imperial service’.10 To be safer, ‘No Mahratta
horseman was taken into service.’ Whether such a strict enforcement of
rules was possible or not is debatable given the not insignificant number of
Maratha soldiers in the Mughal army and the continuous recruitment of
many more. What is clearer is that the Mughals were confident that ‘Sivaji,
beaten and dispirited, had retired into mountains difficult of access, and was
continually changing his position’.11
Shivaji prepared meticulously. He first obtained information through his
spies about Shaista Khan’s armed detachments on the route to Pune and
how entry into Pune could be gained. Despite his precarious position,
Shivaji had a couple of undoubted advantages: his profound knowledge of
the region around Pune and its pathways, visible and invisible, and of Lal
Mahal, which he knew inside out. He picked a squad of 400 trusted men,
left Rajgad early in April 1663, and wound his way, mostly through the
forests along the route, to get to Sinhagad, which was close to Pune. Along
the route from Sinhagad to Pune, a distance of nearly 40 kilometres, he left
behind small detachments at different spots for reconnoitring and to provide
security in case of a skirmish on the journey back. Two groups, one led by
Netaji Palkar and the other by Moropant Pingle, were directed to take
positions a mile away from the Pune camp’s borders. In the evening of 5
April 1663, Shivaji and some carefully chosen soldiers got off their horses
and left the animals in a detachment placed under the leadership of Sarjerao
Jedhe on the banks of the Mula river, just on the other side of Pune.12 From
there Shivaji and his select band walked on foot.
So far, so good. At the gates of Pune, however, the Marathas were stopped
in the night and inquiries made of them, about their identities and their
purpose of entry. At this point they were an approximately 100-strong force.
Shivaji had with him two lieutenants, Babaji Bapuji and Chimnaji Bapuji,
of Khed. At this tensest of moments, Shivaji and his men somehow
succeeded in entering the encampment. There are two theories of how they
slipped in undetected.
One is by Sabhasad. According to him, Babaji and Bapuji, whom he
describes as being among Shivaji’s ‘favourites’, walked at the head of the
team, and ‘behind them all the men and the Raje’. Shivaji himself was
carrying, according to this chronicler, ‘a shield and a sword in his hands’.
Sabhasad writes that ‘the Mahomedan army was vast’, and ‘at various
places in the camp they questioned the Raje, “Whose men are you? Who
are you? Where had you gone?” Babaji Bapuji and Chimnaji Bapuji replied,
as they went on, “We belong to the army and had gone on sentry duty.”’13
What they meant was they were ‘Deccani soldiers of the imperial army
going to take up their appointed positions’.14
The second theory is Khafi Khan’s. He speaks of twin acts by Shivaji’s
men. One group of Marathas formed a wedding procession in which the
bridegroom rode ahead, with ‘his head hung with chaplets of champak-
blossom which concealed his features’,15 and the second, following closely,
came in posing as a bunch of imperial captors and their captives. According
to him:
One day a party of Mahrattas, who were serving as foot-soldiers, went to the kotwal [the local
police head], and applied for a pass to admit 200 Mahrattas, who were accompanying a marriage
party. A boy dressed up as a bridegroom, and escorted by a party of Mahrattas with drums and
music, entered the town On the same day another party was allowed to enter the town on the
report that a number of the enemy had been made prisoners at one of the outposts, and that
another party was bringing them in pinioned and bare-headed, holding them by ropes and abusing
and reviling them as they went along.16
Once inside, Shivaji and his aides were in familiar territory and found a
secluded corner, somewhere close to Lal Mahal, to ‘put on arms’.17 At
midnight, Shivaji led some of his men ten according to the Jedhe
Chronicle18 inside Lal Mahal, while the rest waited outside. Shivaji, who
knew every inch of the place, guided his men throughout. They first entered
the kitchen taking a path known to Shivaji. It was the sixth day of the
month of Ramzan, and many of the cooks had already woken up to prepare
the meal that’s usually taken before dawn. Shivaji and his men killed the
cooks soundlessly, before making their way to Shaista Khan’s harem. There
was a wall separating the two areas of the house, but there had been a door
there, as Shivaji well knew, which had recently been blocked with bricks
and mud. As the Marathas began trying to bring it down, the noise of their
pickaxes woke up some servants inside the harem. They rushed to Shaista
Khan’s chamber, separated from the harem by ‘tents within tents, a maze
like that of seven concentric houses’.19 When the servants told him about
the noise, Shaista Khan angrily rebuked them for having disturbed his sleep
for no reason. The sleepy Khan ‘scolded’ them, writes Khafi Khan, ‘and
said it was only the cooks who had got up to do their work’. In the
meantime Shivaji and his Marathas had breached the wall and were hacking
away at the ‘tents’, which were large curtains elaborately placed one after
the other, in a long row, as noted earlier, to afford privacy to Shaista Khan
while he was with the women of his harem. Soon the seven layers of
curtains were ripped apart and the frightened cries of women in the harem
reached Shaista Khan, causing him to panic.
Before he could pick up his weapons, Shivaji was upon him, with
Chimnaji Bapuji right behind. With a single stroke of his sword, Shivaji cut
off three of the Khan’s fingers on the right hand, according to Sabhasad.20
Khafi Khan has it that it was Shaista Khan’s thumb that was cut off, and the
Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the official Mughal account of Aurangzeb’s reign, states
it was the forefinger that was severed.21 While this debate continues, it
seems clear Shaista Khan was too startled by the suddenness of the attack to
be able to respond coherently. He was provided cover by some of his ‘slave
girls’ and assistants and somehow dragged to safety. In the commotion,
some of the women put out all the lamps and flickering candles, which
made things even more chaotic, the Marathas attacking wildly and two of
them falling into a cistern they couldn’t see. The water reservoir, as
mentioned earlier, had been built recently for Shaista Khan and for the
harem’s women, and the Marathas who otherwise knew the place well, were
taken unawares.22 Two of Shaista Khan’s women were also attacked, in the
confusion. According to Maratha records, the darkness made it impossible
for the attackers to see their adversaries. Khafi Khan describes the attack on
the women, which he does not say was inadvertent, in gory detail.
According to him, one of the two women ‘was so cut about that her remains
were collected in a basket, which served for her coffin’. The other woman,
he says, ‘recovered, although she had received thirty or forty wounds’.23
The Marathas now had the run of the house they knew so well. Some
killed guards, derisively saying, ‘This is how they keep guard!’ Some
stepped inside the nagarkhana, where all the kettledrums were kept, and
ordered their players to beat the drums ‘in the name of the Amiru-l Umra’.
In the din, all the cries for help went unheard. Shaista Khan’s son Abul Fath
Khan fought the Marathas bravely, and killed two, but was soon wounded
himself and succumbed to his injuries. ‘A man of importance who had a
house behind the palace of the Amiru-l Umra’ heard the outcry, writes
Khafi Khan, and ‘finding the doors shut, endeavoured to escape by a rope-
ladder from a window, but he was old and feeble, and somewhat resembled
Shayista Khan. The Mahrattas mistook him for the Amiru-l Umra, killed
him and cut off his head.’ The assailants, Khafi Khan says, ‘gave no
thought to plundering, but made their way out of the house and went off’.24
This raid presumably lasted not more than fifteen or twenty minutes; it was
frenzied, feverish and chaotic.
Shivaji had no desire to linger. According to the Jedhe family’s records
and Sabhasad’s narrative, he took the ‘direct route’ out of town and went
across the river, which wasn’t far from Lal Mahal.25 The other men too
slipped out unnoticed with him, and the Mughal soldiers looked for them
inside the Pune camp in vain.
A story that has gained ground about Shivaji’s escape from Lal Mahal is
narrated in the Chitnis Chronicle, a latter-day, and not too reliable,
document. According to this, Shivaji’s men blew their horns while leaving
Pune, as a signal to a Maratha unit hiding in the nearby Katraj pass to light
torches tied to trees and to heads of bulls. The blazing torches gave the
chasers the impression that the Marathas had gone that way, and a Mughal
unit rode rapidly towards the lights while Shivaji, with his associates, went
off in the opposite direction, towards Sinhagad. The popularity of this tale
can be gauged from the fact that in Marathi, ‘to lead someone up the Katraj
pass’ means to trick them with a red herring. It is one of the Shivaji era’s
more famous linguistic legacies, though the story itself is fictitious and has
been junked by every bona fide historian.
At daybreak, the Mughals counted their losses. Apart from Abul Fath,
Shaista Khan’s son, six concubines and forty of Shaista Khan’s soldiers had
lost their lives. Two other sons of the Khan and a few women had been
wounded. Shivaji’s side, on the other hand, had lost six soldiers, and forty
Marathas had been injured.26
The man who bore the brunt of Shaista Khan’s anger in the morning was
Jaswant Singh, the Jodhpur royal and governor of Gujarat. Neither he nor
any of his men, numbering a few thousand, had stirred out in the night to
help find Shivaji and his Marathas despite being in and around the town. On
seeing him, Shaista Khan said sarcastically, ‘I thought the Maharaja was in
His Majesty’s service when such an evil befell me.’27 (He meant that
Jaswant Singh ought to have come to Shaista Khan’s rescue since he was on
duty hence ‘in the Majesty’s Service’.) Jaswant Singh had no reply to
offer. He stood shamefaced in front of Shaista Khan, who had himself
completely lost face.
The amir-ul umra did not remain in Pune for long. He shifted soon to
Aurangabad, leaving Pune under the charge of Jaswant Singh. Early the
following year, and still carrying the stain of humiliation, Shaista Khan was
shunted out to Bengal as subahdar by a sorely displeased Aurangzeb.
Shaista Khan was keen to see the emperor before he moved there, but his
stock was so low that Aurangzeb didn’t even grant him an audience. Shaista
Khan pleaded with Aurangzeb in writing that he be allowed to stay put so
he could wreak vengeance upon Shivaji. He wrote to his friends asking
them to save him from removal and even offered to pay from his own
pocket the expenses of the Deccan campaign. Nothing worked. ‘Aurangzeb
was immovable in his determination, and replied with severity that a man in
a passion could never act with prudence, that the stay of Shaistah Khan in
the Dakhin as leader against Shiva Ji could result in nothing but the loss of
his army.’28 Thus a final order was issued: Shaista Khan must, ‘without
further discussion’,29 leave for Bengal, a place seen as ‘a penal province’ at
the time and described by Aurangzeb as ‘a hell well stocked with bread’.30
Aurangzeb was leaving no room for doubt that he was giving his maternal
uncle a punishment posting.
Understandably, in the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the reference to this episode is
extraordinarily short and terse, as if it is too embarrassing to mention in any
detail. It states that Aurangzeb was on his way to Kashmir when he heard,
in the first week of May 1663, of what had happened:
On Friday, the 1st May/3rd Shawwal the Emperor resumed his journey [to Kashmir]. One of the
occurrences in this period was the night attack of the infernal Shiva on the camp of the Amir-ul-
umara, the cutting off of his forefinger during the encounter, and the slaughter of his son Abul
Fath Khan. As this incident was due to the negligence of this premier noble, the Emperor
punished him by transferring him from the viceroyalty of the Deccan [which was given to prince
Muhammad Mu’azzam] to that of Bengal. On Tuesday, the 14th [of] May/14th Shawwal, the
Emperor reached Bhimbar, which is the gateway to Kashmir.31
Word of Shivaji’s astonishing audacity nevertheless spread far and wide,
and extremely quickly. A letter sent by the Rajapur-based British official
Phillip Gyffard to his Surat factory bosses is of considerable value because
Gyffard got his information from Shivaji’s chief official in Rajapur, Raoji
Pandit, and made it a point to write it all down without any delay. In his
letter written on 12 April 1663, exactly a week after Shivaji sprang his
surprise on Shaista Khan, Gyffard states that Shivaji himself had
communicated to Raoji the details he was writing about:
Rougy Pundit is returned Yesterday arrived a letter from the Rajah, written himself to Rougy,
giving him an account [of] how he himself with 400 choice men went to Shasta Ckaun’s camp.
There, upon some pretence (which he did not incert in his letter) he got into his tent to Salam, and
presently slew all the watch, killed Shasta Ckaun’s eldest sonne, his sonne in law, 12 of his cheife
women, 40 great persons attending him, their Generall, wounded Shasta Ckaun with his owne
hand (and he thought to death, but since heares he lives), wounded 6 more of his wifes, 2 more of
his sons, and after all this returnes, loosing but 6 men and 40 wounded, 10000 horse under Raja
Jeswantzin standing still and never offered to persue him, so it’s generally believed it was done
with his consent, though Sevagy tells his men his permisera [Parameshwara or God] bid him doe
it.32
Shivaji may have attributed the failure of Shaista Khan’s mission against
him to a divine favour, but his own personal prestige as a rebel military
leader rose immeasurably in the wake of the nocturnal strike. His name
resounded throughout the Mughal empire and in parts of the subcontinent
where the empire did not hold sway. Several European travellers to India in
the seventeenth century, writing of their experiences on the subcontinent,
made note of it in as much detail as they could summon, given their limits
of language and interpretation.
One of these Europeans was the Frenchman Francois Bernier. Born in
1620, Bernier, a protégé of the famous philosopher Petri Gassendi, had
obtained a degree as doctor of medicine. Caught by the travel bug, he left to
explore the East in 1656. After spending some time in Egypt, he sailed to
Surat in 1658–59. On his way from Surat to Agra, he met Dara Shukoh, and
reluctantly became his physician. After Dara was compelled to flee to Sindh
in his battle with Aurangzeb, Bernier extricated himself from his household
and reached Ahmedabad, where he lived under the protection of a Mughal
noble. He travelled all the way up to Kashmir and was on his way to the
north in 1663 when he heard of certain events in the Deccan. He recorded
these goings-on as part of what he termed as ‘Remarkable occurrences’ in
the first five years of Aurangzeb’s rule:
A revolt had taken place, headed by a gentile of Visapour, who made himself master of several
important fortresses and one or two seaports belonging to the King of that country. The name of
this bold adventurer is Seva-gi, or Lord Seva [Shiva]. He is vigilant, enterprising, and wholly
regardless of personal safety. Chah-estkan, when in the Decan, found in him an enemy more
formidable than the King of Visapour at the head of his whole army and joined by those Rajas
who usually unite with that prince for their common defence. Some idea may be formed of Seva-
gis intrepidity by his attempt to seize Chah-estkans person, together with all his treasures, in the
midst of his troops, and surrounded by the walls of Aureng-Abad. Attended by a few soldiers he
one night penetrated into Chah-estkans apartment, and would have succeeded in his object had
he remained undetected a short time longer. Chah-est was severely wounded, and his son was
killed in the act of drawing his sword.33
Another traveller, the Italian Niccolao Manucci had run away from Venice
in 1653 at the age of eighteen. He boarded a vessel for the Turkish port
Smyrna and, under the protection of an English noble whom he met on
board, came to India, where he too, like Bernier, served under Dara Shukoh
as an artilleryman. After Dara’s defeat he didn’t want to work directly with
Aurangzeb and instead found employment with the Mughal noble Mirza
Raja Jai Singh. He left that job later to head to Bassein or Vasai, ‘where he
narrowly escaped the Inquisition, and thence to Goa’,34 finally landing in
Agra and Delhi. During his days with Jai Singh, he would meet Shivaji and
later even be employed by the Portuguese in Goa to hold negotiations with
Shivaji’s son Sambhaji. But before that he had heard, while very much in
Mughal service, of Shaista Khan’s fiasco.
Manucci described the attack and added:
I leave it to the reader to imagine the confusion existing in the [Khan’s] camp that night, everyone
imagining that Shiva Ji was in their midst and slaying all men without intermission. In this
confusion Shaistah Khan’s sufferings from his wound were increased from not being able to call
in any surgeon for fear that, in place of a surgeon, some traitor might gain admittance.35
If we set aside Parmanand’s Shivabharat, the first systematic biography of
Shivaji to have been written was in the Portuguese language. Its author, as
mentioned earlier, was a Portuguese national, Cosme da Guarda, a
Marmugao (Goa) resident in the seventeenth century. As the scholar
Surendra Nath Sen has noted, da Guarda completed his work, Life of the
Celebrated Sevagy, in 1695, a year before Sabhasad finished his account of
Shivaji’s life.36 His observations on the Shaista Khan incident are
interesting because, as a contemporary of Shivaji, he obtained his
information from a number of people while he was in the Deccan.
Da Guarda was convinced that there was a secret pact between Jaswant
Singh and Shivaji, which Shivaji had brought about with his wiles.
‘Jassomptissingha [Jaswant Singh] was a Gentio [Hindu],’ da Guarda
stated, noting that:
Sevagy took advantage of this [fact] for he was a [Hindu] and sent him one night a rich present of
precious stones, a large quantity of gold and silver with many rich and precious jewels. With these
marvellous cannons, Sevagy fought and reduced that fortress. The message was as follows:
‘Though Your Highness has the greatness of a Sovereign King and [now] also that of the General
of so powerful an Emperor, if you recollect that I am a Gentio like you, and if you take account of
what I have done, you will find that all I have done was due to the zeal for the honour and
worship of your gods whose temples have been destroyed by the Mouros [Moors]. If the cause of
religion have precedence over all the goods of the world and even over life itself, I have for the
same cause risked mine so many times.’37
Referring to the gifts he was sending across, Shivaji, wrote da Guarda,
went on to say that he was offering Singh ‘these trifles … in the name of the
gods themselves’.38 And while he understood that Singh had ‘to defend
those whose salt and water you eat and drink’ and could not, on account of
holding a jagir of the Mughals, ‘take the side of another’, there were still
ways in which he could offer assistance. Da Guarda quotes Shivaji as
saying:
You may so behave that you may not fail in the loyalty professed or in the respect due to your
gods that I may mix with the people of Sextaghan [Shaista Khan], to be able to do as I like, and to
do to him, without the knowledge of the Mouros, what I can.39
‘Jassomptissingha was less devout and more ambitious’ and ‘was much
obliged for the presents’, da Guarda pointed out.40
We have no way of knowing whether Shivaji truly wrote such a letter to
Jaswant Singh, but the contents of the purported letter indicate da Guarda
had heard of Shivaji fighting in the name of the gods. It is a clue to the kind
of conversations and discussions then going on in the Deccan. The theory of
Shivaji attempting a Hindu revival was evidently in currency in his lifetime;
apart from Cosme da Guarda, the two contemporary chroniclers closest to
Shivaji, Parmanand and Sabhasad, have referred to it.
However, Shivaji’s sense of Hinduness appeared to hold various faiths
within its wide embrace. After Shaista Khan had occupied Pune and its
surrounding regions, Shivaji had, through an order issued on 18 December
1660, ordered that grants given to Hindus and Muslims alike in those parts
be continued as before. ‘There are inams [grants] given to Hindus and
Muslims in Poona, Indapur, Chakan, Supa and Baramati,’ he wrote. ‘Before
Afzal Khan I had the mokasa [land rights] of these places, and inam-holders
used to receive their grants. They will continue to receive them as before.
Arrangements to this effect have been made.’41
Shivaji’s new-found confidence after the defeat he inflicted on Shaista
Khan is best exemplified by a letter he wrote to the Mughals soon after the
Khan’s humiliating withdrawal. In that taunting letter, an attitudinal
tailpiece of sorts to stories that were circulating of his repeated triumphs, he
accused senior Mughal generals and officials of sending totally fabricated
reports of their activities in the Deccan to Aurangzeb:
Maharajah Shivaji to the Officers and Counsellors of the Emperor Alamgir
Letter drafted by Nila Prabhu Munshi
Farsighted and thoughtful men know that, for the last three years, famous generals and
experienced officials [of the emperor] have come to these parts. The emperor had ordered them to
capture my forts and territory. In their despatches to the emperor they write that the territory and
the forts would be captured soon. They do not know that even the steed of unimaginable exertion
is too weak to gallop over this hard country, and that its conquest is difficult. It is a matter of great
wonder that they do not at all expect the fruit of shame from such writings filled with fictitious
statements, but are not ashamed of sending false reports to the Emperor. My home, unlike the
forts of Kaliani and Bidar, is not situated on a spacious plain, which may enable trenches to be run
or assault to be made. It has lofty hill-ranges, 200 leagues in length and 40 leagues in breadth;
everywhere there are nalas hard to cross; sixty forts of extreme strength have been built in this
region, and some [of them are] on the sea coast. Afzal Khan, an officer of Adil Shah, came to
Jaawali with a large army, but he was rendered helpless and perished. Why do you not report to
the emperor what has happened [here], so that the same fate may not overcome you?
After Afzal Khan’s death, the Amir-ul-umara [Shaista Khan], marched into these sky-kissing
hills and abysmal passes, laboured hard for three years and wrote to the emperor that I was going
to be defeated and my land conquered in a short time. The end of such a false attitude was only to
be expected. He was disgraced and had to go away. This much is as clear as daylight.
It is my duty to guard my homeland. To maintain your prestige and save your reputation, you
send false reports to the emperor. But I am blessed with Divine favour. An invader of the beloved
country of this man, whoever he may be, has never succeeded.
[Lines in verse]
The wise should beware of this river of blood
From which no man (ever) carried away his boat (in safety).42
Shivabharat, 289.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 122; Mehendale (English), 250–251. I have stuck here almost
entirely to the translation from the Persian done by Pagadi, though in his footnotes he has by
mistake mentioned the source as English Records on Shivaji when what he really meant and
Mehendale has correctly mentioned as the source was Selected Documents of Aurangzeb’s Reign
(Persian), ed. Yusuf Husain Khan, Central Records Office, Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1958,
27.
The letter is part of N.C. Kelkar and D.V. Apte, eds., Shivkalin Patra Saar Sangraha (Marathi), Vol. 1
(Shiva Charitra Karyalaya, 1930), 217. Translation is mine.
Quoted in Mehendale (English), 251.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 123.
Jedhe Chronology, quoted in Mehendale (English), 250.
Shivabharat, 309.
Two letters, one by Pilaji Nilkanth, Shivaji’s chief official at Prabhavali in southern Konkan, and
another by Shivaji to Pilaji, speak of Bijapurs recognition of Maratha claims on the Konkan.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 121.
Kelkar and Apte, Shivkalin Patra Saar Sangraha, 224. Translation is mine.
Muntakhabu-l Lubab of Muhammad Hashim, Khafi Khan, translated and quoted in Elliot and
Dowson, The History of India, Vol. 7, 57–58.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 42–43.
Ibid., 43.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 69.
Kincaid, The Grand Rebel, 139.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 58.
Ibid.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 126.
Sabhasad, 43.
Ibid., 44.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 59.
Cosme da Guarda in Sen, Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, 66–67, quoted in Mehendale (English),
792.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 59.
Ibid.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 126.
Mehendale (English), 255; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 70.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 59.
William Irvine, trans., A Pepys of Mogul India 1653–1708: Being an Abridged Edition of the ‘Storia
Do Mogor’ of Niccolao Manucci (E.P. Dutton and Company, 1913), V–VI.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 59.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 71.
Saqi Mustad Khan, Maasir-i-Alamgiri, 19.
English Records on Shivaji, 53–54.
Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668, A revised and improved edition
based upon Irving Brock’s translation by Archibald Constable (Archibald Constable and Company,
1891), 187–188. Accessed at the Columbia University website:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6093710_000.
Irvine, A Pepys of Mogul India, V–VI.
Ibid., 106.
Sen, Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, XV.
Ibid., 64–65.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 65–66.
Ibid., 66.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 117.
The translation here is a combination of the translations made respectively by Sarkar in House of
Shivaji (126–128) and Pagadi in Chhatrapati Shivaji (129–130). In my selection of their translated
lines, I have depended as much on fluency, crispness and flavour as on accuracy and correctness.
OceanofPDF.com
7
The Sack of Surat
The afternoon of 5 January 1664 began like any other for the Loyall
Merchant, a ship of the British East India Company stationed in the waters
of Swally (Suvali) on India’s western coast. These shores of Swally formed
the entry and exit for the port of Surat, and therein lay their significance.
Surat was, in certain ways, more important to Mughal India than Agra or
Delhi. If Agra and Delhi were its political centres, Surat was the empire’s
trading heart. Here it was that all kinds of ‘Persian, Arabian, Egyptian,
African, Chinese and European’1 goods and commodities landed, to be
distributed across the land; and it was from this economic hub that products
from Gujarat, Lahore, Kashmir, Agra, Patna, Golconda, Bijapur, the
Malabar coast and the wider Karnataka and Tamil parts found their way out
to other, far-off shores. No other place in the Mughal empire could compete
with it in terms of wealth, traffic and sheer grandeur. As if to complete the
picture, there was also the element of religion: it was from Surat and its port
that ships left for Mecca, taking several thousand pilgrims to Islam’s holiest
site and bringing them back every year. The numerous gardens in the city
reflected its abundant prosperity: they had trees that were ‘full of various
fruits continuing all the year round’.2
On this particular afternoon, business in the port was brisk as always, with
hundreds of ships and vessels loading and unloading their cargoes and the
customs house occupied with its everyday, apparently countless clearances.
For the English officers and sailors on the Loyall Merchant, things were
likely to have been even ebullient: the ship was getting ready to leave for
England on one of its trips. That mood was disrupted by a visit from one of
the top messengers of the Company’s Surat factory. At 3 p.m., the
messenger arrived and gave the ship’s captain, a certain ‘Mr James,’ a ‘hot
alarme’ that Shivaji was ‘within 10 or 12 miles of Surat’.3
All of Surat was taken completely by surprise. There had been no sign of
Shivaji moving from his base towards the direction of Gujarat, and certainly
not towards Surat. But clearly, he had left from his base in the Deccan
several days earlier, and had rested with his men in the mornings and
journeyed on horse mostly through the night. He had been spotted near
Bassein and then near Nasik, no doubt, but then that was familiar ground
for him where he might venture every now and then to test either the
Portuguese or the Mughals. But Surat? It had been deemed almost entirely
out of the question because of the distance of over 400 kilometres involved.
According to Sabhasad, it was Shivaji’s spy-in-chief, Bahirji Naik, who
had shown the Maratha leader the quietest and most discreet route to the
gates of the flourishing town. Bahirji’s surname was Jadhav, and he was
chosen by Shivaji as naik (from where he’d got his suffix or almost a new
surname) or head of the jasoods or intelligence gatherers, because he was
considered ‘a very shrewd man’. Shivaji had sent him to Surat well in
advance to collect information on the town’s riches and defences, and
Bahirji had reported on his return that ‘if Surat is plundered, wealth beyond
count would be found’. He also offered to act as principal guide on the
route, saying to Shivaji, ‘I shall conduct the army to a safe place, avoiding
any meeting with the Mughals. Your Majesty should not be anxious.’4
The British factory’s officials wanted the captain to immediately send
forty armed men to the city to guard the Company’s stocks. Surat was of
extraordinary importance to the Company as well; Bombay, obtained barely
three years ago by the British from the Portuguese as a dowry gift, was at
the time little more than a mosquito-infested swamp. Soon, many more
armed men were sent, so that in all, 200 of them 150 Englishmen and 50
‘peones’5 – were in place to defend the factory.
Shivaji set up camp, with 8,000 of his soldiers accompanying him, at
Gandevi, which was about 45 kilometres or a little over an hours horse ride
to the south of the city. The immensely wealthy merchants of Surat,
described by the foreign traders as ‘grave, judicious, neat, tall, goodly’ and
‘cloathed in long white callico or silk robes’, panicked at once and started
looking for ways to escape. The safest spots they could go to with as many
of their riches as they could hurriedly gather, they felt, were the Surat fort,
which was distinct from the city, and the factory of the British East India
Company; the poor, on the other hand, tried to flee across the river nearby
in boats with their families and whatever little they had got. Surprisingly,
for a city so filled with money and incredibly precious items, whose total
customs collection came to 12 lakh rupees a year,6 it had no walls and
barely any security cover. Perhaps its very prosperity had resulted in a sense
of security bordering on complacency. Not that there was no official
machinery in place. The city had a governor, Inayat Khan, who was also the
fort commander and was supposed to keep a well-equipped defence force,
but everyone, rich or poor, knew he was simply in the business of siphoning
off funds. While he took funds from the Mughal treasury to maintain a force
of 500 or more, he hired only a small number of soldiers, if any at all, and
misappropriated the money meant for the rest. The local population knew
all this, so naturally, the sense of alarm grew as evening fell.
Many traders wanted to get inside the British factory as early as possible
for the protection of their lives and riches. They knew the Company’s
officials had, apart from calling in 200 personnel from Swally, made further
preparations for the defence of the property. Swiftly, the president of the
Company’s Surat Council, George Oxenden, had procured four brass guns:
two from the Company’s own ships nearby, and two from a local merchant.
The factory, which the British referred to in their written records as simply
‘the house’, was sought to be filled with ‘victuals, water and powder’, some
of the men were ‘set to melt lead and make bullets’, and portholes were
made in what Company officials called their ‘great gate’ so that any fire
could be directed outside from there. Three of the guns were taken to the
top of the factory to scour the two main streets outside, and one was
positioned in such a way that it looked down from atop the next-door
residence of Haji Said Baig, one of Surat’s most affluent merchants. Baig’s
house was of the same height as the British factory, and the British thought
if it were possessed by the enemy, their factory could be in genuine danger
of being successfully attacked.7 Officials at the Dutch factory in another
part of the town were similarly alert and had made adequate preparations as
well.
The rest of the city, though, stood mightily exposed, and the majority of
the houses too were not such that they would take well the brunt of a
powerful assault. Surat’s total population was two lakh. Its overall shape
was ‘ill-contrived into narrow lanes’ which were mostly ‘without any
forme’. The few homes of the ultra-rich were made of bricks, but these
were scarcely two or three in number. Most of the local residents’ houses
were either made entirely of wood or a combination of brick and wood, ‘the
main postes’ of which were simply timber, with the rest of the structure
built of bamboos or cane; many dwellings had nothing but mud walls and
floors.
The whole towne is unforteified either by art or nature and its situation is upon a large plaine of
many miles’ extent … They have only made against the cheefe avenues of the towne some weake
and ill-built gates, and for the rest in some parts a dry ditch, easily passable by a footman, wanting
a wall or other defence on the inner side; the rest is left so open that scarcely any signe of a ditch
is perceiveable.8
Sometime in the evening, Shivaji sent two of his envoys to Surat’s
governor, Inayat Khan, with a letter asking the governor and the three most
eminent and ‘money’d men in the towne’ Haji Said Baig, Virji Vora and
Haji Kasim ‘to come to him in person immediately’9 and settle the terms
of ransom for the entire city. According to the account left behind by
Volquard Iversen, an eyewitness present at the Dutch factory there, Shivaji
communicated to both the British and the Dutch ‘that he was now in need
of money to maintain his army and that a considerable sum must be
advanced to him’, failing which ‘he would set fire to the whole town’.10 He
was determined to avenge the ruin of his land by the Mughals over the past
three years. British records state that Shivaji sent a note to the president of
the British Company’s Surat Council, George Oxenden, stating that:
he was not come to doe any personall hurt to the English or other merchants, but only to revenge
himself on Orom Zeb (the Great Mogol) because he had invaded his country [and] had killd some
of his relations, and that he would only have the English and Duch give him some treasure and he
would not meddle with there houses; ells he would doe them all mischeefe possible.11
Oxenden himself remarked in a letter he sent to England that Shivaji’s
‘designe was not altogether riches but revenge upon this King
[Aurangzeb]’.12 Shaista Khan had destroyed the treasury of Shivaji’s
provinces, caused arbitrary injury to the local population, and the damage
done to fields and marketplaces had punctured his sources of revenue. The
governor refused to concede Shivaji’s demand, but out of sheer fright, he
himself sought refuge inside the Surat fort. The message to all of Surat’s
residents was transparent: their official commander, in charge of the city’s
defence, had gone into hiding.
At about eleven the next morning, 6 January 1664, Shivaji reached Surat
and, while he was occupied with pitching his tent near a ‘great garden a
quarter of a mile’13 beyond the city’s eastern gate, his soldiers, on his
explicit instructions, rode into the town and began sacking it and setting
houses on fire. These were ‘shock and awe’ tactics aimed at securing a
hefty ransom. With the forces lodged inside the castle, the Marathas had
decided to engage in a very light way, not aiming to combat them, but to
merely prevent them from blocking the sack. From within the fort, firing
was at times regular and at other times intermittent, and from the British
and Dutch accounts, it is evident it caused ‘more damage to the houses than
harm to the enemy’.14
Starting Wednesday, 6 January, the day the Marathas entered Surat, the
city burnt for four straight days. Shivaji’s men had a more or less free run,
plundering and firing at will and setting all kinds of houses ablaze. The only
resistance offered was by the British and the Dutch, who prevented them
from getting into their factories by firing back from within. Shivaji had no
desire to engage in battle; nor did he want to waste ammunition and the
lives of his Marathas. He was in Surat only to gain ransom and to send a
chill down the mighty Mughal empire’s spine. So where resistance was
offered – and it was only in these two places – he got his men to back away.
But neighbourhoods even in the immediate vicinity of these factories were
set aflame.
Of the three most moneyed merchants, Haji Kasim had his residence dug
up and its contents plundered, after which his property was promptly set on
fire. According to the British version of events, Shivaji’s men also broke
open and plundered Haji Said Baig’s house and warehouse, situated right
next to their factory, for one full night. Sensing imminent danger to its own
property if Baig’s home was either strengthened as a temporary station by
the Marathas or set afire, the Company, wrote its Surat Council chief,
‘caused a party of foote to sally forth and fight them, in which scuffle wee
had three men slightly wounded, our men slew a horse and man, some say
two or three’.15 The Surat British factory having thus soon ‘cleared its
quarters’, its officials ‘shut up the doors and barricaded them and made a
passage from our into his [Baig’s] house, and kept a garrison in a balcony
that cleared all the street’.16
Unlike Baig’s property, Virji Vora’s couldn’t escape the conflagration. If
Baig was a Muslim, Vora, reputed to be ‘the richest merchant in the world’
at the time with assets of 80 lakh rupees,17 was a Gujarati Hindu, though the
historian Jadunath Sarkar has mistaken him for a Muslim and incorrectly
written his name as Baharji Borah.18 From the ‘magnificent house’ of this
‘Banyan [bania] merchant, Virji Vora’, wrote a Dutch witness, ‘gold,
money, pearls, gems and other precious wares’ were taken before it was
reduced to ashes.19
On Thursday, 7 January, the second day of the Maratha offensive, an
attempt was made on Shivaji’s life. It enraged his followers so much that it
might have resulted in a full-scale massacre if not for a timely alert that the
assassination bid had not been successful. That morning, an emissary had
come from the Surat governor to meet Shivaji and offered ‘some
conditions’, which were presumably terms for settlement of the ransom
amount. The proffered deal, the British noted, ‘pleased Sevagee not at all’,
and he asked the emissary indignantly whether his master, the governor,
‘cooped up in his chamber, thought him a woman to accept such
conditions’.20 The emissary angrily responded, ‘We are not women’, and
adding, ‘I have somewhat [something] more to say to you’, he suddenly
drew his dagger and ran ‘full at Sevagee’s breast’. Before he could get to
Shivaji, a Maratha soldier reached him and with his sword struck off his
hand. The would-be assassin, however, had ‘made his thrust at Sevagee
with all his might’ and ‘did not stop’ but ‘ran his bloody stump against
Sevagee’s breast and with force’, with the result that ‘both Sevagee and he
fell together’. Shivaji’s tunic was stained with blood, and many of his
followers, thinking ‘he was killed’, sent out a cry of ‘kill the prisoners’, at
which point some prisoners the Marathas had taken from the town, one of
the Britishers wrote, ‘were miserably hacked’.21
The soldier who’d hacked off the would-be assassin’s hand had just
‘cloven off his ‘skull’ when Shivaji quickly got up from the ground and
asked his men to stop the killings. Instead, he ordered them to ‘bring the
prisoners before him’.22 There were more than a hundred of them, of
various faiths, creeds and nationalities, as Surat boasted of people from
faraway lands like the ‘English, Dutch, Portuguese, Turks, Arabs,
Armenians, Persians, Jews’, apart from the ‘Indians of several sorts
(principally Banians) or else Moores, the conquerors of the country,
Hindues or the ancient inhabitants or Parsees, who are people fled out of
Persia ages ago and here, and some miles up the country, settled in great
numbers’.23
Once the prisoners were lined up, an infuriated Shivaji ordered the heads
of a few of them severed and the hands of many others to be cut off. In all,
the British recorded, ‘four heads and 24 hands’ were cut off.24 A British
East India Company employee, Anthony Smith, was among those produced
before Shivaji. The moment Shivaji commanded that his right hand be
chopped, Smith ‘cryed out in Indostan [Hindustani] to Sevagee rather to cut
off his head’. To do that, Smith’s hat too was taken off, ‘but Sevagee
stopped [the] execution’, and his life was saved.25 Shivaji demanded 3 lakh
rupees as ransom for Smith’s release but later heard he was only a ‘common
man’ and eventually let him go for a ransom of 300 rupees, though not
without ‘a message full of threats and menaces’ to the British factors.26
The historian Jadunath Sarkar came to the erroneous conclusion in his
biography of Shivaji that once Smith’s hat was taken off, Shivaji realized he
was an Englishman and therefore spared his life.27 The truth is, Shivaji had
known all along that Smith was an Englishman and a Company employee.
Smith needn’t have taken off his hat for his face, identity and colour to be
obvious. Shivaji had in fact asked him more than once over the previous
two days to convey his demand for ransom to the English factors, as well as
his demand that they not impede the Marathas when they sacked Vora’s
house, which was, like Baig’s, near the English factory. Smith had landed at
the Dutch port on Wednesday and was on his way to the English factory
when he was taken into custody by Shivaji’s soldiers and dragged to their
camp. It was to Smith, according to the British version of events, that
Shivaji first made it clear he intended no personal harm to the British; the
same evening, he asked him to go to his employers’ factory with a message
from the Marathas. Smith agreed but insisted that he be accompanied by a
guard, in case he was harassed or caught in a crossfire. Perhaps smelling a
rat, Shivaji then called off the plan and packed him off to the part of the
camp where all the other prisoners, including the ambassador of the king of
Ethiopia, had been kept. Not a single document, not even the English ones
which extensively cite Smith’s case and his movements – noting that on the
day after his life was spared, he did indeed go to the English factory with a
fresh Maratha demand for ‘3 lakh rupees’28states that he was identified as
an Englishman at the moment of his hat being taken off in front of Shivaji.
That bit is a work of imagination from Sarkar that mars his otherwise
excellent writing on Shivaji. The Maratha leader had wanted Smith to carry
his message to the British camp, and Smith had agreed to do that, more than
once. That was evidently the reason his life was spared.
The fires that raged across Surat were the most terrible on Thursday (7
January) and Friday night, according to the account left behind by the local
English chaplain, Reverend John L’Escaliot. On the night of Friday, 8
January 1664, the blaze, L’Escaliot said, was ‘so great’ that it ‘turned the
night into day, [just] as before the smoke in the day tyme had almost turned
day into night, rising so thicke … it darkened the sun like a great cloud’.29
In the midst of recording their details of the sack and the violence, three
European travellers to India of that period, Bernier, Thevenot and Jean-
Baptiste Tavernier, wrote of Shivaji’s act of magnanimity as well. On the
day of Shivaji’s arrival in the city, Father Ambrose, who was chief of the
local French Capuchin Mission, went up to him and earnestly appealed to
him not to do any violence to the poor Christians living in Surat. Shivaji not
only ‘took him [the Reverend Father Ambrose] into his protection’30 but
issued instructions to his soldiers that ‘the Frankysh Padrys are good men,
and shall not be molested’.31
Shivaji, besides, spared the house and property of a local Hindu dalal of
the Dutch Company, because he was informed that the man had been ‘very
charitable while alive’.32 This shroff or money-changerwas identified by
Tavernier as ‘Mondas Parek’ (Mohandas Parekh), and he had died exactly
three years before, in January 1661.33 But his karma was such that he was
much praised by all: he had ‘bestowed much alms during his life on the
Christians as well as on the idolators [Hindus]’, and ‘the Reverend
Capuchin Fathers’ had lived ‘for a part of the year on the rice, butter and
vegetables which he sent them’.34
Sometime on Saturday, Shivaji got wind that a Mughal army was on its
way from the north to provide relief to Surat. By then the sack had been
pretty thorough, and he was preparing to leave with his soldiers. The Dutch
factory that morning sent out an Indian informant on twin assignments. The
first was to pass on a message to the English factory that if Shivaji
threatened them again, he should be told that the Dutch and the English
would fight him together. The second was to find out what Shivaji was now
up to. Having delivered the communique to the English factory, the spy left
to take a look at the rest of the town, where he found ‘the houses of the
principal merchants laid in ashes’, and from there headed for Shivaji’s
camp. He returned in the evening, the Dutch wrote.35 At the Maratha camp
situated just outside the city, ‘he [the spy] saw Shivaji sitting on the ground
and his men bringing him the plunder’. There were no tents at all to be seen
anywhere, so it was assumed, correctly, that they had been already
dismantled by the Marathas, and that ‘their stay would only be short’.36
Shivaji and his men left for home, with the booty gathered, on Sunday
morning, camping one night over 20 kilometres away before proceeding
home via the Konkan coastline. The Portuguese, who ruled much of upper
Konkan, suspected Shivaji chose this route deliberately with the aim of
implicating them in the sack.
The day Shivaji departed Surat was 10 January 1664. For a full week after
that, most of the traders and their families did not return to their houses or
properties, afraid that the Marathas might come back any moment as
rumours of their imminent return continued to circulate. It was only when
the Mughal army entered the city on 17 January 1664 that the merchants
came out of hiding. So did, at the same time, the Surat governor, Inayat
Khan. When he finally walked out of the castle, secure in the knowledge
that the Mughal army would provide him security, the townspeople who
had returned ‘derided him and flung dirt at him’ for his extraordinary
cowardice. Incensed, Inayat Khan’s son vented his anger over this public
humiliation of his father by shooting a ‘poor Bannian’ who had just come in
from across the water, with his pack on his back. The helpless, unsuspecting
bania got an arrow in his mouth and was killed on the spot, an act which the
Loyall Merchants British officials described as one that showed ‘the
insulting pride and baseness ofthe rulers of Surat. They had not had the
courage to stand up to the enemy ‘to save their estates, yet killed a poore
Bannian that had not done them any injury’, the ship’s officials wrote
acerbically.37 The ship’s departure from Swally’s shores, of course, was
delayed by Shivaji’s advance; it ultimately left only at the end of January
1664.
What was the monetary worth of what the Marathas had carried away
from the Mughal empire’s Gujarati commercial centre for their otherwise
depleted exchequer? Though estimates vary quite a bit, the historical
consensus on the closest-to-accurate figure is between 1 crore and 1.5 crore
rupees, cited by three different British sources.38 The Mughal historian
Khafi Khan wrote, ‘Shivaji took from Surat an immense booty, in gold and
silver, coined and uncoined. Millions in money and goods came into the
hands of that evil infidel.’39
The Surat operation mounted by Shivaji and his Marathas is a good
example of the ruthless medieval to early modern era tactic of stripping an
attacking adversary of much of his prime economic power to make up for
the losses suffered on one’s own lands, of showing oneself to be as severe
as possible, and wreaking enough destruction to build up one’s own image
as an equal foe, capable of inflicting intimidation and pain and leaving a
permanent mark. Shivaji had already declared in his letter to Mughal
officials after Shaista Khan’s humiliation that he would defend his
homeland until the last; in Surat, he provided a demonstration of the terrible
ramifications that any destructive incursions into his lands would have for
the aggressor. A convulsion of huge proportions, the Surat raid became part
of the gathering storm of incidents and clashes all tending in the direction of
a major Shivaji versus Aurangzeb conflict.
Almost immediately after the Maratha raid, Aurangzeb was inundated
with requests from all the resident merchants of Surat, and from the British
and Dutch companies, for exemptions in view of the massive losses they
had suffered on the Mughal civil and defence administration’s watch, which
had turned out to be no watch at all. George Oxenden, the president of the
Surat Council, had begun to press this demand on the very day the Mughal
army reached Surat. He had put down his pistol in front of the military
general in charge, saying it was now for the Mughal forces to protect the
city. The general offered Oxenden ‘a horse, a sword and a vest’ to
acknowledge the opposition the English had put up against the Marathas,
but Oxenden told him those were ‘things becoming a soldier, but they were
merchants and expected the Emperors favour in their trade’.40 Aurangzeb
agreed, allowing the local merchants, the British and the Dutch not to pay
any customs duties for a year. After that, for the courage they had shown
against the Marathas, the English and Dutch were also given a 0.5 per cent
reduction in customs payments, but it would apply only to imports; for
exports, they would continue to pay the regular 3 per cent.41
The other prompt fallout, as expected, was the ouster of the derelict city
governor Inayat Khan and his replacement by one Ghiyasuddin Khan.42 A
worried Aurangzeb also instructed his officials to get a stone wall built
around Surat for its protection. The more lasting impact was the scare
Shivaji had created in the minds of the Mughals, their generals and officials,
and the merchants in their territories. What the Surat Council of the British
wrote to its counterparts in Karwar in the south barely months after the
sensational sack shows how Shivaji had begun to evoke strange and
phantasmagoric visions:
Sevagy is so famously infamous for his notorious thefts that report hath made him an airy body,
and added wings or else it were impossible he could bee at so many places as he is said to bee at,
all at one time.
Sometimes he is certainly believed to bee in one, and in a day or two in another place, and so in
halfe a dozen remote one from another, and there burnes and plunders all without controule, so
that they ascribe to him to performe more than a Hirculian labour that he is become the talke of all
conditions of people.43
Shortly after Shivaji returned to his capital, Rajgad, his father Shahaji Raje
Bhosle died in Karnataka. Shahaji fell off his horse in a hunting accident in
Hodigere (now in Karnataka’s Davangere district), and succumbed to his
injuries on 23 January 1664.44 The Adil Shah gave the rights to Shahaji’s
jagir in the Bangalore–Mysore and Thanjavur regions to his younger son
Ekoji or Vyankoji. The Dutch recorded in a letter from their Vengurle
factory that ‘the old preying bird Shahaji, father of the great rebel Shivaji’,
had passed away.45
Early in the twentieth century, the outstanding Maratha historian V.K.
Rajwade discovered a document by one Jayram Pindye which credibly
established Shahaji’s fluency in the Sanskrit language and his patronage of
Sanskrit scholars in his court, thus revealing a dimension of his personality
other than his record as a military general and jagir holder. From the
description the document offers, Shahaji in his later years ‘appears to have
kept a splendid court in Bangalore’.46
Jayram Pindye was a poet who lived close to the town of Nasik. In his
work,47 which combines prose and verse, he stated that ‘having heard of the
fame of Shahaji and of the patronage he extended to learning’, he thought
of travelling from his home near Nasik to Bangalore. On reaching there, he
was introduced to Shahaji ‘through a man called Shivaraya Goswamin’. He
straightaway placed twelve coconuts in front of Shahaji. Asked why he’d
done that, he said it was to indicate he could compose poems in twelve
languages. He was told to produce an example of his work, and he recited
his Sanskrit poem, titled Radha Madhav Vilas Champu, a depiction of the
love of Radha and Krishna.
Shahaji was happy but insisted that a poet’s ‘real test’ was ‘in the
completing of a Samasya’. A ‘Samasya’, in Indian and particularly Sanskrit
linguistic tradition, is part literary play and part challenge, where a poet or
composer is given a portion of a stanza and asked to complete it and make it
appear coherent and whole. ‘Let us all give him Samasyas to fill,’ Shahaji
told all his officials in court, and began by setting a Samasya for the poet
himself. He was followed by Malhari Bhatt, Naropant Hanmante and
thirteen others at the court, with Hanmante in particular ‘looking up,
yawning, and shaking his body’ in a deliberate display of languid cerebral
style while providing his own literary puzzle; and then more officials
thirty-five in all are named ‘came forward to set Samasyas in different
vernaculars’. The poet apparently ‘acquitted himself satisfactorily, was
given presents and was entertained by Shahaji at his court’.48 Finally, when
Rajwade found Pindye’s Radha Madhav Vilas Champu, it had three parts:
the first part the original which was recited in Shahaji’s court, the second,
also in Sanskrit, containing details of the poet’s visit to Shahaji’s court and
his stay at the court, and the third an appendix of sorts ‘which gives the
poems in the vernacular composed by Jayram and other poets of Shahaji’s
court’, set out ‘separately in the end as it was not considered proper to
include them in the body of the Sanskrit work’.49 Going to Shahaji’s court
evidently resulted in an expansion of Pindye’s body of work.
Shahaji’s death came soon after his elder son Sambhaji’s passing in a
military campaign, a second major blow for Jijabai. Desolate, Jijabai
decided, according to Sabhasad’s version,50 to become a sati by committing
the traditional sacrifice carried out by a woman on her husband’s funeral
pyre. But Shivaji dissuaded her from doing any such thing. Such a practice
was by no means unheard of in the Deccan, but it was hardly common
among the Marathas, even if we were to take Sabhasad’s version at face
value.
Shivaji, writes Sabhasad, was ‘very sad’ and ‘lamented much’ the death of
his father, remarking, ‘I have no elder left after him now.’ When his mother
expressed her wish to immolate herself, ‘the Raje sat on her lap’, put his
hands around her shoulders and ‘made her take an oath that she would live
and refrain from self-immolation’. ‘There is none to witness my heroic
deeds, you must not go,’ Sabhasad quotes Shivaji as saying. ‘With such
exhortations,’ he writes, ‘the Raje, as well as all other great men, after great
exertion made her desist.’51
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 163.
Ibid.
Log of the Loyall Merchant, 5 January 1664 and Consultations at Surat, 6 January 1664, quoted in
English Records on Shivaji, 60–62.
Sabhasad quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 225.
Ibid., 60–61.
The traveller Monsieur de Thevenot quoted by Sarkar in Shivaji and His Times, 71.
All of these details of preparations made by the East India Company’s officials to protect their
property and lives were recorded by the chaplain in Surat, the Rev. John L’Escaliot, in a letter
dispatched to Sir Thomas Browne in January 1664. The letter is quoted in English Records on
Shivaji, 75.
Ibid., 72.
Letter from the president of the Surat Council, East India Company, to the Company, quoted in ibid.,
66.
Iversen quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 195.
English Records on Shivaji, 76.
George Oxenden’s letter to Bantam, quoted in English Records on Shivaji, 86.
L’Escaliot’s account in ibid., 75.
Iversen quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 192.
English Records on Shivaji, 67.
Ibid.
Ibid., 78.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 74. Iversen’s account from the Dutch factory correctly mentions the
name as Virji Vora. Quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 196. The chaplain of the British
factory also named him correctly as ‘Verge Vora’, though he got the spelling wrong.
Iversen, quoted in ibid., 196.
English Records on Shivaji, 79.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 72.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid.
Surat Council’s letter quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 181.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 76.
English Records on Shivaji, 75–78.
Ibid., 80.
Thevenot, in Sen, Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, 180.
Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, Vol. 2, 188.
Ibid., 188–189.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Letter from the Governor General of the Dutch factory in India, in Sen, Foreign Biographies of
Shivaji, 189.
Ibid., 189–190.
Log of the Loyall Merchant in English Records on Shivaji, 61–62.
The English chaplain L’Escaliot and Henry Gary, an employee of the East India Company, believed it
was 1 crore rupees, while the log of the Loyall Merchant mentioned 1.5 crore rupees and above.
Quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 2, 175.
Mehendale (English), 271.
Ibid.
Ibid., 272.
Letter of 26 June 1664 from Surat Council to Karwar, English Records on Shivaji, 88.
The Marathi Sabhasad chronicle and the Dutch records cited by Mehendale (English), 278.
Dutch records cited in ibid., 278.
Rawlinson and Patwardhan, Source Book of Maratha History, 26.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 90–91.
Ibid., 91.
OceanofPDF.com
8
A Naval Enterprise
With loot pouring in from Surat, Shivaji was now able to feed his
fascination for the glistening waters of the Arabian Sea. He was on the
lookout for a strong base in southern Konkan, substantial parts of which he
was ruling now, to enhance his naval might against the Mughals, the
Portuguese and even the Siddis, who still held on to Janjira, the one place
Shivaji coveted. In the late 1650s, as we saw earlier, he had captured the
ports of Kalyan, Bhiwandi and Prabalgad near Panvel in upper Konkan, but
those places had slipped out of his hands later, with either the Mughals or
the Portuguese having resumed their domination. The Malvan coastline just
north of Goa was well suited to be precisely that kind of coastal
headquarters in southern Konkan that Shivaji wanted: it had a reef-lined
harbour and quite a few rocky isles.
On a visit there after the sacking of Surat in the early part of 1664, Shivaji
noticed an island about 1.5 kilometres off the coast that appeared bigger to
him than most of the others in those waters. He asked about it and was
informed by two local officials accompanying him, Krishna Sawant Desai
and Bhanji Prabhu Desai, that the island was locally known as ‘kurte’,1 with
a hard ‘t’. Shivaji was keen to take a close look and was carried there by
boat. He noticed how cautiously the path had to be navigated to reach the
spot: there were too many small rocks to go around, and that, from a
military captain’s point of view, was a very good thing. On setting foot on
the island, he ordered the building of a robust fort there. Work was to start
immediately, and the fort an island fort, surrounded by water on all sides,
as distinct from a coastal fort, which would have land on at least one side of
it – would be named Sindhudurg.
With a perimeter of about 3 kilometres, the fort would be spread across 48
acres and have fifty-two bastions, with forty-five well-built steps leading to
the top of each. Nearly 500 stonecutters, 200 ironmongers, 100 Portuguese
workers and 3,000 other labourers got down to building it.2 Construction
was completed in three years, by 1667, and a letter issued the following
year by Shivaji shows that the Maratha official Rajaji Bhosle was appointed
hawaldar or commander of the fort.3 A post-Shivaji era document estimates
that the expenditure incurred towards construction was one crore hons,
which is evidently an exaggeration because one hon was worth about 3.75
rupees, and the cost in that case would come to 3.75 crore rupees, at least
2.75 crore more than what Shivaji had got from Surat.4 Even so, there’s no
doubt Shivaji spent a significant amount of money obtained from the sack
on this fort.
Owing in part to its somewhat ragged shape, Sindhudurg remains a thing
of rugged handsomeness in the Konkan, with two intriguing features: a
couple of prints one of a right hand and the other of a left foot which a
legend old enough to have found a mention in the Bombay Gazetteer of
1880 has claimed are those of Shivaji, and a temple dedicated to Shivaji,
built after his passing. The temple is unique because it has perhaps the only
representation of Shivaji we have without a beard. The idol of Shivaji
installed there, purportedly built during the time of his younger son
Rajaram, shows him sporting a moustache and, remarkably enough,
according to the Maratha historian G.H. Khare, ‘a topee that resembles that
of a Koli (fisherman or boatman)’.5 The Kolis and Bhandaris are the two
original inhabitants of the Marathi-speaking part of India’s western coast,
including Mumbai, and it’s a measure of the kind of identification the
fisherfolk began to have with Shivaji that his image acquired the headgear
of a Koli. For them, Shivaji was the one indigenous ruler of the seventeenth
century who cared for the two communities, and who respected the sea and
its power and potential. The ‘outsiders’ had always done so and had ruled
unchallenged over the coast: Shivaji recruited the Kolis and the Bhandaris,
mingled with them as one of their own, and won them over, as he won over
the people of the hills. And he claimed the seas for the indigenous people
and for their own raj, which was the raj or state he was establishing. For the
Bhandaris too, just as with the Kolis, the identification with him was close:
Shivaji came to have a Bhandari as one of his seniormost naval officials.
A little to the north of Sindhudurg, Shivaji discovered, at the time he was
scouting the coast, a fortress locally called ‘Gheria’ on top of a mountain
against which the sea waves crashed. It was surrounded by the sea on three
sides. He instructed that it be restructured and rebuilt, and named it
Vijaydurg. With three layers of fort walls, it provided strong security cover;
after Shivaji’s death, it was used by the famous Maratha admiral Kanhoji
Angre to stock ammunition. A second existing sea fort, further to the north,
was identified and reconstructed and its defences fortified; Shivaji gave it
the name Suvarnadurg. The names themselves indicate he was attaching a
great deal of importance to these citadels: one was named for the river
Sindhu or Indus that distinguished Hindu civilization for the rest of the
world, the second one for ‘Vijay’ or victory, and the third for ‘Suvarna’ or
gold. Soon after these three forts were ready, he made a handsome annual
allowance of 10,000 hons for the upkeep of each.6
Shivaji’s focus at this point was also on the designing of frigates which
he had started acquiring, albeit in small numbers, in the second half of the
previous decade and on developing his overall naval fleet. English and
Dutch records offer ample indication of his efforts in this regard. In June
1664, the British East India Company’s officials in Surat wrote to their
colleagues in Karwar about how they were ‘alarmed’ enough ‘to expect him
[Shivaji]’ ‘by sea’ this time around. They had received reports that he was
‘fitting up and building’ sixty frigates. What was his reason for doing that?
They offered two theories: one, that he intended to ‘waylay’ ships
belonging to Surat on their return from ‘Bussorah [Basra] and Persia’, and
two, that he had ‘designs to run up the river of Cainbaya [Cambay]’ and
land his army there so it could ‘march up to Ahmadavad’ from there and
sack that city.7 The following month, the Portuguese captain in Chaul near
Alibaug wrote to his Goa headquarters that Shivaji was building fifty ships
for combat, of which seven were ready in upper Chaul and would be out to
sea soon. Should he obstruct these Maratha ships when they ventured out,
the captain asked the Goa officials. If yes, he’d need reinforcements, he
wrote; he didn’t have enough men with him in Chaul. In its reply, Goa’s
Portuguese advisory council advised him not to lock horns with Shivaji and
not to block his ships for the moment, but it decided to send fifty military
men from Bassein (Vasai) to Chaul nonetheless, should the need for its
defence arise.8
Aurangzeb, a sharp military general himself, was sufficiently concerned
by these naval developments. He could see that Shivaji had started, from
the late 1650s onwards, focusing on the seashore and was intently building
his naval strength. The Dutch in Surat wrote in mid-1664 that the new
Mughal governor of the city, Ghiyasuddin Khan, had approached them as
well as the Britishers with a message from the Mughal emperor:
[The Mughal] ‘king had ordered him [Khan] by firman to request the English and us [the Dutch]
to lend a ship each to His Majesty about 15th or 20th September, in order to meet, near St. John,
His Majesty’s ships, which are expected to arrive from Mocha and to protect them against all
hostilities of the robber Siwasi who, as people said, was going to fit out a fleet against the
Mogol.9
‘St. John’ here is an unsaintly mutilation of Sanjan, a port in Gujarat.
Aurangzeb promised that any charges the European powers would incur
‘would be refunded either in cash or by granting more freedom in
business and exemption from toll’.10 The British agreed to send a convoy,
and the Dutch too consented to deploy their vessel Vlielant to assist the
Mughals, but not without some reluctance.11 (The Dutch later wrote that
‘the [Mughal] king’s ships safely came back from Mocha with the English
and the Dutch vessels.’ 12)
The Dutch reluctance was mainly owing to the fact that Shivaji was an
emerging power in the region, and they didn’t want to incur his displeasure
by ‘helping the Moors’, especially when he, during his attack on Surat, ‘did
not attack our lodge there, although he certainly would have been able to
capture it, or at least set fire to it’ and when ‘that rebel and his subaltern
governors have not yet shown us any hostile feeling but have openly tried to
keep up friendly relations’.13 It’s not that the Dutch officials trusted the
Marathas. They in fact believed Shivaji was inclined to be cordial because
‘he knows the Company’s maritime power, which might inflict great losses
on him’.14 He wouldn’t want losses at a time he’d sensed a chance to
become a maritime power himself in both defence and trade, they reckoned,
writing that ‘he intends to open up an intensive traffic in many quarters, and
tries to obtain a busy navigation in the parts he has taken under him’.15
‘Commerce’ was something ‘he is taking up pretty busily by stimulating the
merchants to traffic’, they noted a second time, in another report.16
Shivaji indeed wanted a piece of the marine trading ecosystem. In fact, the
very same year, at a port in southern Konkan controlled by the Marathas,
one of Shivaji’s officials, Raoji Somnath Pandit, ‘received 2 small ships
back from Mocha’; this ‘brought him such a nice profit that he has at once
made 8 or 9 ships ready to sail to Mocha, Congo, Persia, Mascata, Atsji,
etc.’17 The Dutch, momentarily anxious to keep the peace, had mixed
feelings about this: they decided they would ‘not give passes for those’
ships.18 They also noted with considerable concern that Shivaji ‘has got 50
frigates on the stocks along the straits’ and that his ‘subedar Rauji Pandito
and Bikasi Pandito have written several flattering letters to our people in
Wingurla [the port of Vengurla then under Dutch domination] whereby they
offered every friendship and service’.19
Apart from the talk that the Marathas’ share in sea-based trade was slowly
inching upwards, what worried the existing powers the most was a possible
threat to their security. The Dutch made the point in their internal
communication to their bosses that:
Siwasi has struck a great terror amongst the Moors. They think that they will be attacked by him
from the sea also, although, as far as is known, he never before sailed on the sea. If he did, the
awe he has inspired would enable him to inflict still greater losses on the Moghul with robbing
and plundering. He is a man, as it is said, of great conceptions and designs which he knows how
to contrive and execute with ingenuity. This might raise him to such a high latitude of power
among the terrified Moors, especially now that he has come to perceive the timidity of these
people in making his raid on the town of Suratte, of which exploit he will no doubt be very proud
and boastful.20
Given these perceptions, it wasn’t surprising that Aurangzeb asked Bijapur
to help the Mughals in ousting the Marathas from southern Konkan at once.
If Bijapur cooperated, Aurangzeb would redeem its yearly tribute; if not, he
would lead an army himself and invade the Deccani Sultanate. The Adil
Shah promptly deputed his forces, and they captured the coastal town of
Kudal from the Marathas in mid-1664. The Bijapur army was told to press
forward further, and Khawas Khan, an Abyssinian general, was sent at the
head of a force of 10,000 cavalry. Accompanying him was a contingent led
by Lakham Sawant of Konkan who, as we see in a previous chapter, kept
changing sides. Interestingly, Bijapurs army included Shivaji’s stepbrother
Ekoji Bhosle who had inherited their fathers Karnataka jagir. A Maratha
general, Baji Ghorpade, was also heading there from his home town of
Mudhol (further inland from Kudal along the coast) to provide further
support with his own 1,500-strong infantry. Ghorpade, described by Dutch
officials as ‘one of the most excellent commanders’, was crucially ‘in
charge of the [Bijapur] King’s cash for paying Chaveschan’s [Khawas
Khan’s] army’.21
In a sense, all three of these Marathas were Shivaji’s kin, because Ekoji
apart, the Sawant-Desais of Kudal and the Ghorpades of Mudhol had close
family ties with the Bhosles. ‘Ghorpade’ was even known as an alternate
surname of sorts for ‘Bhosle’. But while the Sawant-Desais had played both
sides, Baji Ghorpade had stood out as a confirmed enemy of Shivaji’s
family in particular. On a July morning in 1648, it was Baji Ghorpade who,
along with two other Bijapur officials, had entered Shahaji Raje Bhosle’s
chamber in Jinji, put chains around him, and taken him to Mustafa Khan’s
camp, where he was imprisoned before being taken to the Adil Shahi capital
by Afzal Khan. Mustafa Khan had died long ago, and Shivaji had killed
Afzal Khan in 1659. Ghorpade was still around and still assisting Bijapur
against the Bhosles and the death of Shahaji, which had happened barely
months ago, was fresh in Shivaji’s mind.
Shivaji picked out Ghorpade and mounted so ferocious an assault on him
and his men in Mudhol that the Bijapur general was seriously wounded and
soon died of his injuries, leaving his men demoralized. Shivaji had
unmistakably targeted his fathers tormentor in the devastating attack. Next,
Shivaji marched against Lakham Sawant and killed several of his men. The
twin blows scared Khawas Khan into going back to Bijapur and Lakham
Sawant into fleeing to Bardez in the Portuguese colony of Goa.22 The Adil
Shah later wrote to his officials 100 kilometres south of Kolhapur asking
them to provide refuge to Sawant. ‘As Shivaji caused him much harassment
and he could do nothing against it, Lakham Sawant had to desert from his
watan,’ the Bijapur ruler said by way of explanation.23 The Vengurla coast
was barely 20 kilometres away from Kudal, and Vengurla’s frightened local
governor similarly ran away at the prospect of Shivaji and his men arriving
there; so did the local Dutch official there, carrying away with him to Goa
‘spices and other goods to save them from Shivaji’.24 The Dutch reported
that ‘Sivasy’s army consisted of 10 thousand foot-soldiers, 5 or 6 thousand
horsemen, and 90 frigates, and this army was followed by 7 or 8 thousand
“biggerys” [begaris or labourers] and 4 to 5,000 pack animals carrying
provisions and diverse other necessaries for the army’.25
Pushing on with the success at Vengurla, Shivaji, from October to
December 1664, ‘seized at sea several Moorish frigates arriving at this
roadstead from Persia and Mosquetta (Muscat)’, wrote the Dutch officials,
adding ‘some of these belonged to his own lord [Bijapur, as they saw it] and
others to the inhabitants’.26
The Dutch have left behind an account of how some ships were taken. On
3 November, they stated, Shivaji’s fleet captured ‘two little ships’.27 ‘One of
them, belonging to Cannara, was taken by surprise, while it was riding at
anchor and was carried away without a shot being fired.’ The second
vessel had not yet cast anchor, and ‘his [Shivaji’s] men’, the Dutch pointed
out, ‘thought they could attack’ it ‘in a similar way’. The vessel belonged to
‘the old queen’, the Badi Sahiba of Bijapur, and the Marathas faced so
much resistance that ‘they could not have captured it if its powder had not
been damp’. (Having got wet it could not be used effectively.) Shivaji got
the vessel, but not before losing about sixty men, ‘while no more than four
men were wounded on the frigate’.28 The moment they climbed on board,
Shivaji’s men found the frigate’s captain ‘had stabbed himself out of
despondency, saying he would rather die than fall into Siwasi’s hands’.29
The next morning the Marathas took the vessel to Kharepatan, ‘unloading
the stolen goods and storing them in the fortress of Giria [Gheria]’. When
they were busy doing that, ‘one third of their rowers ran away’, which the
Dutch felt wasn’t a surprise, ‘for many of them were peasants who had
never plied an oar before, nor had even been at sea’.30 Shivaji was truly
building his naval fleet from scratch, and it’s perfectly possible he had
roped in farmers with no previous experience of being on the seas. Many of
them could scarcely be blamed if they didn’t comprehend that he was
actually building a Maratha state, and many others might have been
sceptical at that time about the success of the Maratha forces as they were
genuine novices in the waters. Shivaji was breaking new ground and
wading through waters totally unfamiliar to his flock; it was a measure of
his ambition, his enterprise and his willingness to ride the storm.
On the evening of 8 November, ‘two Musquet (Muscat) frigates
appeared’.31 The first, as soon as it heard ‘news about Sivasi’, didn’t
approach the shores but ‘directed her course homeward to Cannara’. The
second ship was from Yemen. Its master, a Christian named Manuel
D’Andrade, anchored it in Vengurla, ‘inquired about Sivasi’s whereabouts’
and asked the local Dutch officials to advise him on whether he should stay
there. The Dutch told him Shivaji had promised ‘safe conduct to the
merchants and the frigates that came safely to anchor’, and ‘moreover, he
[D’Andrade] had brave Arabs on board on whom he must rely more than on
Sivasi’s security’. He answered, ‘I may trust him, but I trust my arms most.
Very well, I will wait here for three days.’32 Meanwhile, thirty of Shivaji’s
frigates came ashore. One of the Maratha captains, whom the Dutch records
identify only as ‘Mocquerly’, approached the Dutch officials and told them
he’d initially thought the ship belonged to their Company but had now
found out it didn’t. He’d proceed to take possession of the ship,
‘Mocquerly’ said.33 The Dutch officials advised him not to do so as Shivaji
had promised safe conduct to frigates in the seaports and ‘handed him two
letters of security granted by Sivasi to the Dutch, the English and the
Portuguese’.34 Further, they told him not to harm the ship before he had
orders from Shivaji and said he and the Dutch both ‘ought first to write
about this matter to Sivasi’ and ‘obey’ whatever reply he gave. In a huff, the
Maratha official walked off to his armada, set on the course of action he had
decided on, but was finally dissuaded by the Dutch not to go ahead.35
Another Maratha official, ‘Daria Sarangh’, wouldn’t stay back, however.
He pursued the Yemen ship with all of his own vessels, and though
D’Andrade sailed safely past in the morning, the Maratha ships ‘came up to
him at about four o’ clock in the afternoon’. They ‘fired four shots’ and got
‘grape-shot’ in return, the Dutch wrote, and ‘Sivasi’s fleet got some men
killed and wounded, after which they returned in a great hurry without
thinking of pursuing the vessel any farther’.36
But on another ‘little ship to Surat’, there were hardly any brave soldiers.
This ship had a ‘200 tons burden’ and ‘was manned by more than 100 men’,
among them two Englishmen serving as gunners; it carried fourteen guns,
besides. Yet, rather inexplicably as the Dutch perceived it, the ship’s
captains surrendered to Shivaji’s fleet ‘without resistance, to the surprise of
all the inhabitants who were firmly convinced that it could not be
captured by Sivasi’.37 When the Marathas boarded and captured the ship,
the Dutch wrote, they ‘divided her crew among their frigates’ in order to
prevent any kind of mobilization before towing her away.38
At sunrise on 7 December, a ship belonging to the Dutch Company’s
merchants ‘Cassiba’ (Kashiba) and ‘Santubasinay’ (Santuba Shenavi) had
just about anchored itself when it was seized by the Marathas. The Dutch
considered its capture ignominious because the Maratha naval official,
‘Daria Sarangh’, had himself offered the captain of the ship a lifeline: he
had, said the Dutch, ‘advised’ the captain ‘to cut the cable and sail away’.39
A few weeks later, at noon on 26 December, Dutch officials noticed, from
the top of a mountain, a little ship being vigorously pursued by Shivaji’s
fleet. The Marathas chased it ‘till late in the evening, nearly as far as
Wingurla’, but when they found out it was a Dutch ship called the ‘Cadt’,
they sailed away.40 The worried ship’s master told the Company’s officials
early next morning when he came ashore that he’d been pursued by
Shivaji’s armada for twenty-four hours.41
Based on what they were seeing around them, the Dutch themselves got
their own factory fortified against Shivaji by calling in nine men from their
vessels and 2,000 pounds of gunpowder. They ‘also enlisted 10 peons,
especially to serve us at the guns’. ‘With all these, together with some Arab
merchants who had fled into the lodge, some Christians, and a few native
inhabitants, we considered ourselves sufficiently strong to bear an attack
from the admitted rebel, as his soldiers had already shown courtesy in many
respects,’ the Dutch officials wrote.42
The Dutch estimated the booty gained by the Marathas from the ships
seized and from Baji Ghorpade’s base during this short period to be
‘8,00,000 gold rups’ rupees, meaning hons; hons were called gold rupees
by foreigners and ‘the spoils taken by land’ to be ‘20,00,000 gold
rupees’.43
To this, Shivaji added fresh gains from a sudden inland raid into Hubli,
which was to the south of both Kolhapur and Belgaum in the Kannada-
speaking parts of the Deccan. The British factors in Karwar recorded that
Shivaji ‘sent about 300 horse’ to Hubli, ‘robbed the town, and carried away
some prisoners, so that Hubely is little better than spoiled’.44 Luckily, when
Shivaji arrived there, the British officials said, they had nothing except
‘1185 pagodas in ready money’.45
By the end of 1664, Shivaji not only had almost all of the southern or ‘Tal’
Konkan in his grip but had attacked parts of Bijapur territory in the uplands
as well. The Britishers in Surat wrote that ‘Sevagy is the sole talk of
court and country’ and ‘raines [reigns] victoriously and uncontrolled [so]
that he is a terror to all the kings and princes round about, dayly encreasing
in strength’.46 They’d already reported he had got sixty-five frigates, though
they considered these vessels ‘pitiful things’ and weak enough for ‘a
hundred of them’ to be destroyed by ‘one good ship’; now, they said he had
‘fitted up more vessels’.47 And another British official from further south,
Henry Gary, reported that Shivaji ‘is destroying by fire and sword all that
he can of the King of Vigapore’s country’.48 It was credibly reported, Gary
stated, that ‘he hath an army of 8,000 horse and 10,000 foote, all small shott
[short] men’.49 Surat’s mandarins wrote that Shivaji was, along with his
scouts, ‘who range all over the country, making havoc’, and added that he
‘continues in great power and force, and much feared by all’.50 After the
Surat raid, they wrote, he had taken possession of ‘eight or nine’ of the
‘most considerable ports belonging to the Deccan’, and from each of these
ports ‘he setts out two or three or more trading vessels yearly to Persia,
Bussora [Basra], Mocha’ and other places.51
Thus Shivaji’s naval power was, in the midst of all the clashes, also
acquiring a degree of stability.
The question on everyone’s mind was: would Shivaji attack Goa next?
The British thought it highly unlikely, even as they hedged in an advisory to
officials at their Karwar factory, asking them ‘not to sleepe too secure but to
be watchfull and procure what intelligence you can of him [so] that you
may make a timely escape where you think you may be most safe’. They
also felt a place like Karwar was so down south, being even beyond Goa,
that he wouldn’t ‘fall down so low as where you are’ as it would be ‘bad
travelling in the raines for either horse or foot; besides, he will have his
hands full if … the King of Vitchapoore setts out an army against him’.52
The Dutch had a different take. According to them, Shivaji was looking at
a pact with them so that they could fight Goa’s rulers together. The Dutch
claimed that in the middle of January 1665, ‘Siwasi’s grand governor,
Raogi Pandito, asked our chief [of the Vengurle factory] Lenertsz’ to send
across ‘a reliable person’ with whom he could discuss ‘important matters’.
When the Dutch sent an official over, Raoji Pandit told him he’d got ‘letters
from his spies in Goa’ saying there had been ‘some estrangement between
the Dutch and the Portuguese’. If that were true, ‘his master Siwasi would
be willing to enter into a contract with the Dutch for the town of Goa’. But
if not true, Lenertsz should not talk about it [the Maratha offer]’, and there
the matter would end.53
And what were the Portuguese thinking? They were apparently getting
mixed signals. In the first place, Shivaji’s frigates had taken, in October
1664, ‘eight boats laden with elephants’ teeth’ which had left for Chaul
from Goa, prompting the viceroy of the Portuguese colony to summon the
‘northern armada’ and pay and post soldiers ‘on the frontier against him
[Shivaji]’.54 Then, early in January 1665, the Portuguese viceroy wrote to
his king in Portugal that both Shivaji and the Adil Shah wanted to have a
tie-up with Goa.55 These conflicting signals were far from helpful to them in
making up their minds.
But unlike the Britishers, the Portuguese weren’t inclined to dismiss the
Maratha ships as ‘pitiful things’ that could easily be taken care of. Shivaji’s
fleet was mostly made of galleywats (or gallivats or galvetas) or what in
Marathi were termed galbats. These were chiefly rowing boats, but large in
size for boats of that kind; they generally had two masts, of 40 to 70 tons;
and they carried four to eight guns.56 Small meant speedy, so these galbats
could well have an advantage over the slow-moving, big Portuguese ships.57
Thus, unwilling to take any chances in view of Shivaji’s growing power, the
Portuguese decided to keep ‘a continuously strong watch on all the frontier
places and points round Goa’ and had all these spots ‘continually provided
with victuals and ammunition’.58 The viceroy ordered the islands of
Salsette, Bardez and Goa ‘to be inspected and had a list made of all soldiers
capable of bearing arms’. On Salsette were stationed 64,000 such soldiers,
on Bardez 24,000 and in Goa, 12,000. From among them, ‘the most capable
black men’ were selected 8,000 from the first place, 5,000 from the
second and 3,000 from the third. With ‘shooting arms of their own’, they’d
all have to take their ‘rounds each in their own cities giving notice to the
others to be ready if need be, so that this rebel [Shivaji] is keeping all Goa
in constant alarm’.59
Adding to the sense of alarm, the chief of the Portuguese naval fleet wrote
to Goa’s viceroy that the people of Mirjan, Ankola, Shiveshwar and Karwar
were scared by rumours that Shivaji would soon be there, and the British
officials in Surat too slightly revised their opinion, pointing to Bhatkal in
the south as a likely target.60
While all this talk was on and these preparations were being made, Shivaji
neatly bypassed Goa and sailed well past Karwar and Bhatkal before
suddenly curving in and hitting land in Basrur. Hardly anybody had thought
he’d foray so deep into the Kannada-speaking regions; at the most, it was
surmised, he’d go up to Karwar, which was the southernmost tip of the
Marathi-speaking coastal belt. This was the first – and as it turned out, only
naval campaign undertaken by Shivaji in his life, where he rode the seas
with the wind in his hair and his trusted men by his side in the newly
minted Maratha galbats.
Early in February 1665, Shivaji ‘himself in person set forth’ from Malvan,
the British factory officials in Karwar wrote to Surat.61 He had with him ‘a
fleet of 85 frigots (frigates)’ and ‘3 great ships’. He freely ‘plundered’
Basrur, which at the time was being ruled by a local chieftain,
Somashekhara. Basrurs previous ruler was Somashekhara’s father, the
well-regarded Shivappa, the local king of Ikkeri. Shivappa had evicted the
Portuguese from the place, but the son had, after the fathers death in 1660,
been ceding ground and had more or less been prepared to give the
Portuguese a walkover. Shivaji had sensed an opportunity before the
Portuguese stepped in and taken it. He didn’t want to be enmeshed in a
conflict in one place, not when he knew he’d soon have to reckon with
serious Mughal retaliation for what he’d done to Shaista Khan. He had thus
avoided the strongly fortified Goa and other well-defended spots and gone
further south.
From Basrur Shivaji headed to Gokarna, where the Hindus had one of
their famous places of pilgrimage: the temple of Mahabaleshwar dedicated
to Lord Shiva, built along the seafront circa fourth century CE. There,
Shivaji, a devout Hindu, ‘washed his body, according to the ceremony of
that place’ and moved in the direction of Ankola, wrote the British. Before
leaving Gokarna, he asked all his ships to go back and kept only 4,000 foot
soldiers and horsemen with him, along with twelve frigates which would
help him and his cohort cross the rivers on their way back home via the land
route. On 22 February Shivaji reached Karwar, prompting the British to
hurriedly ‘clap all the Company’s money and portable commodities aboard
a ship’ that belonged to the Imam of Muscat. Its captain promised the
British he’d secure their goods and if needed sail out and take the
Company’s officials to whichever port they wanted to reach. Shivaji’s major
vessels, except the twelve he’d kept back, had gone past Karwar just the
day before; that brought some relief to the British, though they were pretty
sure Shivaji would still try to target them.
The very evening on which the British officials boarded the ship stationed
in the port, there arrived Sher Khan, a lieutenant of the powerful Bijapur
noble Bahlol Khan whose writ ran in the region. Sher Khan was there to
make preparations for Bahlol Khan’s mothers journey to Mecca; a ship
belonging to one Rustom Jemmah was to take her to the holy site. Sher
Khan sent one of his men to Shivaji with a message, saying he had heard
the Maratha leader intended to pass through the town. He told him he
desired him not to take that route, because ‘if he did, he must use whatever
means he could to stop his passage’. ‘A great many goods of his masters
were on the Bunder,’ Sher Khan said, and for their security, ‘he could not
admit of so potent an enemy so near his quarters’. According to the British,
several messages passed between the two, and Shivaji, ‘knowing his
[Khan’s] power with his master and strength of Bullol Caune [Bahlol Khan]
in this kingdom’, finally ‘condescended to go a little out of his way’.
Instead of going through the town, he encamped with his army at the mouth
of the river nearby.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Shivaji sent his ambassador to Sher Khan,
saying that he’d arrived and that he’d heard that aboard the Muscat ship
were the English, plus there was another ship in the port belonging to the
African kingdom of Kongo. Both, Shivaji said, were ready to resist him, so
Sher Khan had better ‘deliver up’ the English ship or move away himself,
permitting Shivaji to take revenge on the British, ‘whom he stiled [styled]
his inveterate enemies’. Sher Khan conveyed the message to the British and
was told by them that they ‘had nothing on board but powder and bullets,
which if he [Shivaji] thought would serve him instead of gold he might
come and fetch’. Shivaji was so exasperated and angered by this reply that
‘he said he would have us [the English] before he parted’. Panicking, the
Karwar governor persuaded the merchants in the town ‘to agree to send him
[Shivaji] a present, lest he should recall his fleet’. The Britishers too
concluded, after having initially sworn defiance, that the best way out was
to promise their own share of 112 pounds ‘than runne the hazard of the
Company’s estate in Carwar, being about 8,000 pagodas’, being invaded.
With the booty thus gathered, Shivaji finally departed on 23 February but
‘very unwillingly’, ‘saying that Sher Khan had spoiled his hunting at his
Holi, which is a time he generally attempts some such design’.
The Marathas led by Shivaji became a coastal and specifically naval
power to reckon with in a short period of time, despite their poor
knowledge of the technology of shipbuilding, their limited ammunition and
the fact that all the foreign powers in India at the time were way ahead of
them in entering the maritime race. Shivaji’s act of systematically building
a navy makes him genuinely unique among all the military leaders of early
modern India. Among them, he was the first mover. At a time when the
Portuguese, Dutch, the British and the French had virtually exclusive rights
over the seawaters, he figured out that in peninsular India, the coastline was
far too important in terms of both defence and trade to be left in the hands
of these powers. His vision was clear-cut, and so were his planning and
execution. But who were the people who helped him build and keep his
navy? Very, very little information has come down to us about these men,
except that it’s not a surprise that the majority of them were from the local
communities that lived along the coast such as Kolis, Bhandaris and
indigenous Muslims. We know for sure the identities of only three of his
naval commanders: Darya Sarang, Daulat Khan and Mainak Bhandari.
Two of these three were Muslim, Daulat Khan and Darya Sarang,
according to Sabhasad.62 Sabhasad also gave some idea of the nature of the
vessels Shivaji had: apart from galbats, he mentioned, Shivaji had such
things as ‘tarande’, which are big sailing vessels, gurab’, mainly two-mast
ships of 150-tonnes burden ‘built to draw very little water, being very broad
in proportion to their length, narrowing however from the middle to the
end’, ‘taru’, simply meaning a sailing vessel, sibad’, ‘large, square-sterned
and flat-bottomed vessel with two masts but no deck’ and known to be
chiefly used for trade, and ‘pagar’, which was just a well-smoothed canoe.63
The British wrote that Darya Sarang’s real name was ‘Ventjee Sarungee’,64
which sounds like a Hindu name. But Sabhasad may be a more reliable
source, and, as the Maratha historian G.B. Mehendale has pointed out, the
surname Sarangee was indeed used among local Muslims – as against Arab,
Persian or African Muslims in the Marathi-speaking coastal corners.65
Darya Sarang was thus most likely neither a name nor a post but a title
Ventjee had been given, and the word darya’, which means the ocean, is
indicative of that. Sarangee seems to have later fallen out of favour with
Shivaji, for in the late 1670s, the British reported that Shivaji had ordered
‘both Deria Saranga and his son’ to be ‘taken prisonerand ‘all [that] they
have seized’.66 What went wrong between Shivaji and his commander? The
historical record is completely silent on that.
Mainak Bhandari was, as his surname makes evident, from the coast-
dwelling Bhandari community. One post-Shivaji-era document has
suggested his surname was Bhatkar.67
Sabhasad mentions one Ibrahim Khan along with Darya Sarang and
Mainak Bhandari as a commander. Here, alas, it looks like he got things
mixed up. Though quite a few historians have counted Daulat Khan and
Ibrahim Khan as two separate people, the most plausible theory about
Ibrahim Khan’s name is that Sabhasad was referring to Daulat Khan and
wrote it wrongly, as there’s no mention of any Ibrahim Khan anywhere else,
whereas the name Daulat Khan is corroborated by several sources. The
veteran Communist Party of India leader Govind Pansare, who was
tragically killed in 2015, wrote a small booklet, ‘Shivaji Kon Hota?’, which
portrayed Shivaji as a champion of the ‘masses’. Looking through his
communist ideological prism, Pansare got quite a few things wrong, and
among those was his mention of Daulat Khan as ‘Darya Sarang Daulat
Khan’.68 Darya Sarang and Daulat Khan, as Jadunath Sarkar has rightly
pointed out, were two different people;69 as noted earlier, Darya Sarang was
emphatically not a position, and it was not a moniker ever applied to Daulat
Khan, who was a commander in his own right.
Gajanan Bhaskar Mehendale and Santosh P. Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar (Marathi) (Param
Mitra Publications, 2010), 165.
Ibid., 165–167; The Sahyadri Companion (Sahyadri Prakashan, 1995), 231.
Letter No. 426 in Shankar Narayan Joshi and Ganesh Hari Khare, eds., Shiv Charita Sahitya, Vol. 3
(Bharat Itihas Sanshodak Mandal, 1930), 37.
Chitragupta Bakhar quoted in Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar, 166.
Khare quoted in Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar, 164.
Ibid., 43.
Letter from Surat to Karwar, 26 June 1664, in English Records on Shivaji, 88–89.
Portuguese letter of 25 August 1664 quoted in Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar,
37; Mehendale (English), 278.
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 234.
Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 234–235.
Ibid., 495.
Report of the Dutch official Pieter Van Antvliet to the Governor General and Council of the Dutch
East Indies, ibid., 513.
Ibid., 514.
Ibid.
Ibid., 501.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid.
Ibid., 116.
Letter of 23 December 1664 from the Dutch Governor General and Councillors for India to the Lords
Seventeen, ibid., 495.
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 533.
The Dutch Dagh Register, two Adil Shahi farmans, and Sabhasad, quoted in Mehendale (English),
284–288.
Adil Shah’s farman, ibid., 287.
Ibid., 288.
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 527.
Ibid., 518.
Ibid., 529.
Ibid.
Ibid., 530.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 531.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 532.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 536–537.
Ibid., 537.
Ibid., 536.
Ibid., 532–533.
English Records on Shivaji, 95.
Ibid.
Letter of 26 November 1664 written from Surat to the Company, ibid., 91–93.
Ibid., 92–93.
Henry Gary’s letter of 1 December 1664 to Surat, ibid., 93.
Ibid.
Letter of 12 March 1665 from Surat to the Company, ibid., 97.
Ibid.
Letter of 26 June 1664 from Surat to Karwar, ibid., 89.
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 518.
Ibid., 506.
Quoted in Mehendale (English), 293.
Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations, 64.
Ibid., 37.
Dutch records on Portuguese preparations against Shivaji in late 1664 and early 1665, quoted in
Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 519.
Ibid., 519.
Portuguese report quoted in Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar, 42; Surat letter of
26 November 1664 quoted in English Records on Shivaji, 92.
The entire account of the Basrur campaign (including the foray into Karwar) is drawn from the 14
March 1665 letter sent by the British East India Company’s Karwar factory officials to Surat, quoted
in English Records on Shivaji, 97–99.
Sabhasad, 93–94.
Sabhasad, 89 (fn 120), 93–94.
Letter of 21 November 1970 from Bombay to Surat, quoted in English Records on Shivaji, 179.
Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar, 173.
Letter of 6 November 1678 from Rajapore to Surat, quoted in English Records on Shivaji, Vol. 2,
187.
Kalmi Bakhar quoted in Mehendale and Shintre, Shiv Chhatrapatinche Armaar, 175.
Govind Pansare, ‘Who was Shivaji?’, translation of ‘Shivaji Kon Hota?’ by Uday Narkar (Lokayat
and Socialist Party [India], 1988), 26.
J.N. Sarkar, The Modern Review (December 1918), quoted in the translation of Sabhasad by
Surendra Nath Sen, 94.
OceanofPDF.com
9
Setback and Retreat
After Shivaji hammered Shaista Khan’s confidence and made him look
ridiculous, Aurangzeb became more determined than ever to sound the
drumbeat of doom for the Maratha who had refused to row back his
rebellion and, seemingly out of nowhere, was presenting a stiffer challenge
to the Mughal empire than any of the other Deccan powers like Bijapur and
Golconda. Asking Bijapur to block Shivaji’s progress on the coast was just
a sideshow; Aurangzeb’s main act, as he surveyed a Deccan vastly changed
in just a little over a decade, was to draft in a highly experienced Hindu
general to do the job of wrecking Shivaji’s emerging ship of state.
That Hindu was Mirza Raja Jai Singh. A member of the royal house of
Jaipur, Jai Singh had entered Mughal service as an orphan at the age of
eight and gone on to distinguish himself in campaigns across the empire,
from Balkh and Kandahar in Afghanistan to Bijapur in the south and
Mungir in the east.1 Greatly skilled at military manoeuvres, he was also
noted for his command of the art of diplomacy, and he had a penchant for
taking things to their logical conclusion for his master unlike Shaista
Khan who, despite his frothy title of amir-ul-umra, had allowed
complacency to set in during a largely successful campaign, with disastrous
results. What made this Rajput prince of Amber, now a wise fifty-six years
old, even more valuable to Aurangzeb was his absolute and unquestionable
loyalty, strengthened no doubt by blood ties. They were bound by blood,
three times over. One of Jai Singh’s forebears had arranged his daughters
marriage to Emperor Akbar; his great-grandfathers sister was married to
Prince Salim who later became Emperor Jahangir; and Jahangir had later
also taken another girl from Jai Singh’s family as his wife.2
Jai Singh had exceedingly competent generals like the Afghan Diler Khan
accompanying him on his campaign against Shivaji. Altogether, 14,000
troops led by various captains, including Jai Singh’s own son Kirat Singh,
left for the Deccan along with him.3 Those who’d been with Shaista Khan
were still very much stationed in Maratha country; if their numbers were
added, the total Mughal count behind Jai Singh stood at 70,000.4
Statistically, Shivaji’s Marathas appeared almost pitiful in comparison.
However, Jai Singh was keenly aware of problems created by size and the
attendant Mughal bureaucracy. The first thing he told Aurangzeb was that
he wanted full freedom in decision-making at all levels. Often local
appointments, payments and various other civil and military matters were
handled by regional straps, resulting in bottlenecks. Aurangzeb’s son Prince
Muazzam, appointed viceroy of the Deccan in place of the disgraced
Shaista Khan, was especially indolent and hadn’t done much in the few
months he’d been there, and that may well have been one reason for Jai
Singh making such demands. Aurangzeb acceded to this, perhaps cognizant
of the prince’s not-so-consequential presence there.
Once he had got all the powers he wanted, Jai Singh hit the ground
running. He wasn’t content with the existing numerical superiority; he
wanted a crushing superiority, and to get that he would use persuasion,
force, bribery, threats whatever was necessary. As he marched across the
Narmada in January 1665 and then after genuflecting, at least physically,
before Prince Muazzam in Aurangabad in February – reached Pune early in
March, he wrote to the successors of the Mores of Jaawali. Hadn’t Shivaji
taken their lands from them? What better way to get them back than to join
the Mughals to destroy Shivaji, he asked them.5 He asked the Siddis of
Janjira to help him stamp out the Maratha menace, for didn’t Shivaji covet
their sea fort like nothing else? Afzal Khan’s son Fazl volunteered himself,
and Jai Singh offered him a 5,000-horse post as a matter of honour.6 Wasn’t
Fazl, too, hungry for revenge? The zamindar of Jawhar, a plateau situated to
the north of Bombay, sent an envoy expressing his desire to join. Jai Singh
wrote to Aurangzeb saying he was convinced the zamindar could be
‘immensely useful’.7
With the Portuguese, Jai Singh used both persuasion and warning. He
dispatched two Portuguese men working with him to Goa, asking the
authorities there to cooperate in the Mughal bid to get rid of Shivaji. He
wrote that he wasn’t happy, though, that some Portuguese men had been
actively involved with Shivaji, forcing the Goa viceroy to clarify that
Shivaji might have employed some Portuguese for his naval activities, but
that didn’t mean they had the Portuguese state’s approval. There were many
delinquent Portuguese all across the Mughal regions and even in Bijapur,
Golconda and other places, over whom Goa had no control, the viceroy
wrote.8 And, of course, he offered all assistance to Jai Singh, though the
Goans, much like Bijapur, had increasingly come to see Shivaji’s Maratha
force as constituting some sort of buffer zone between them and the Mughal
giant that could simply swallow them up.
Worried that the already cornered Bijapur might get together with Shivaji
to fight the Mughals, Jai Singh set about ‘trying to sow dissension’,9 bribing
several Adil Shahi fort commanders and making generous offers of office
and cavalry to Bijapur generals. Somashekhara, the son of Ikkeri’s late ruler
Shivappa Naik whose region Shivaji had partly plundered only recently, and
the zamindar of Basavapatan were sent ‘letters and robes of honour’.10 And
the deshmukhs and deshpandes, key officials in Shivaji’s hill regions, were
threatened with dire consequences if they covertly aligned with Shivaji.11
After cannily getting together a robust set of allies, Jai Singh was adroit
about his camp selection as well. He picked Saswad to the east over the
much more obvious choice of Pune. There, he would in a sense be between
Shivaji’s state and Bijapur: he would not only be able to keep an eye on
both sides and move either way easily, but also preclude the possibility of
the two rivals coming together. Unlike Shaista Khan, who had stopped
touching Shivaji’s forts after the difficult siege of Chakan and had
contented himself with seizing territory, Jai Singh demonstrated a strong
awareness that the hill forts formed the heart of Shivaji’s political
enterprise. If he struck at them, he would strike at the core of the state
Shivaji was attempting to build. All the Deccan territory was of course
needed, but ‘we have primarily to attack the hill forts’, Jai Singh wrote to
Aurangzeb, asking him to send across, for that purpose, ‘big guns’ already
lying with the Mughals and ‘cannons which have been recently cast’.12
And in Saswad itself was one of Shivaji’s most powerful citadels:
Purandar. It was time to go all out against Purandar, one of the sources of
Shivaji’s pride, he decided. After Purandar to the south-west, there were
also Sinhagad and Rajgad to the west of Saswad. Checkmate Purandar, and
the checkmating of Sinhagad and Rajgad could logically follow, Jai Singh
believed.13
While the Afghan Diler Khan was to lead the thrust against Purandar, on
the ground level, a number of large military teams were to plonk themselves
at strategic points across Maratha territory so that the local officials and
populace would submit easily. For example, 4,000 troopers were stationed
under Ihtisham Khan in Pune and 7,000 horsemen under Qutubuddin Khan
in Junnar, with directions to the latter that 3,000 of them should position
themselves in front of one fort, Lohgad, and 4,000 before another, called
Nardurg.14 Jai Singh also issued instructions that several surrounding places
were to be ransacked to forestall any daring strikes. Well before the assault
on Purandar started, Jai Singh had tried, but failed, to entice ‘Almaji and
Kahar Koli and two of his brothers’,15 all tasked by Shivaji to look after the
Maratha artillery at the foot of the fort, by offering them honourable
positions. Now his directions were that if any peasants or military men
surrendered, they were to be welcomed into the Mughal camp and offered
incentives to break the back of Shivaji’s forces.16 Jai Singh’s plan, in short,
was to make his offensive relentless and launch it from all sides.
Not surprisingly, the team led by Diler Khan approached Purandar with
much enthusiasm. But its initial ardour was somewhat dampened by a
bunch of Marathas who slithered down the hillsides and began raining
muskets. The Mughals recovered quickly and chased the Marathas up the
hill, all the way to the machi or the lower posts near the base of the fort, and
even burnt all the houses that stood there. Despite the Marathas firing from
the top, Diler Khan soon had the post under control and called for
reinforcements, which Jai Singh sent promptly and generously. Among
them was a force of 3,000 led by his son Kirat Singh and teams led by
Qubaid Khan, Badal Bakhtiyar, Indraman Bundela and others, all well
stocked with guns and other arms.
The Mughals covered Purandar from all sides, digging trenches, and on Jai
Singh’s orders first targeted its sentinel Rudramal, whose crest gave cover
to the lower fortress of Purandar. Jai Singh told Aurangzeb in a letter,
correctly, that Rudramal held ‘the key to Purandar’.17 If the Mughals wanted
to get to Purandars bale-killa or top fort, they first had to get to the lower
fortress, and if they had to win the lower fortress, they had to go past
Rudramal. Not an easy thing, for Purandar rose 4,500 feet above sea level
and its base itself was at over 2,500 feet. It was rather laborious to carry the
guns within striking distance of Rudramal’s important points. The 10,000-
strong Maratha garrison atop Purandar and its sentinel made the task even
more difficult for over 20,000 of Jai Singh’s men Mughals, Rajputs as
well as Europeans in the artillery department – by showering arrows, stones
and other projectiles. Yet the determined Mughals got there in a matter of a
few days in April 1665 and unleashed a volley of cannon fire. A breach was
created by the fire, and Jai Singh’s sappers exploded a mine placed along
the walls of Rudramal to create another gaping hole, throwing Purandar
open to a full-fledged assault. Though his army had lost eighty people and
over a hundred men had been injured in breaching Rudramal, Jai Singh
strategically offered free passage to the garrison that surrendered there,
hoping it would give reason enough for the main garrison at Purandar to
capitulate without any further fighting.
Jai Singh was evidently satisfied with what he had achieved so far. He
wrote to Aurangzeb, stressing that until then it had been believed cannons
could be used only against forts which stood close to the ground:
But our campaign has established one thing. It is indeed possible to carry the big guns half-way
up the hill forts, to the very place the people of these regions called the machi. From that spot, a
highly effective assault can be launched on the fort. That’s precisely what we did in the case of
Rudramal.18
There was no doubt, he stated, that Diler Khan and his associates had done
an excellent job. ‘But in truth, all of this happened because of the Badshah’s
great good fortune, his manifest destiny,’ he added in supplicating fashion.
‘The enemy [Shivaji] had never before experienced such a disaster. God
willing, his situation will be even more disastrous in the future. Shivaji has
been taught a real big lesson.’19
His men’s aggressive boundary-pushing feat, which left only the main
hurdle of Purandar to be surmounted, made Jai Singh think that he must
move ahead elsewhere to try and undermine Shivaji’s resolve. The
breakthrough at Rudramal offered him a fine perch to launch attacks across
the countryside, and that was what he directed his various units to do. In
their formidable numbers, they set about razing the fertile ground in which
Maratha ambitions were thriving. They showed up in the villages and
districts along the hills, atop the hills and beneath the hills, unleashing a
barrage of strikes and raids.
How he directed all the action is clear from Jai Singh’s missives to
Aurangzeb. First, he explained his reasoning to the emperor. He wanted to
demonstrate to Shivaji that just because the Mughals were busy carrying out
the siege of a major fort like Purandar, they would not remain confined to
that action. No way. There were a great many of them, so even as the siege
progressed, they could very well push their way into the rest of the Maratha
country without a break. Second, he was convinced that the moment was
right to make a hit and encircle the enemy from all sides, just when the
attention of Shivaji’s men was focused on what was for them, without
doubt, the looming crisis of Purandar.20
Further, Jai Singh spoke of the exact nature of the attacks that were being
organized and carried out. To the west of Purandar lay Shivaji’s most
important hill fort, Rajgad, where the Maratha had set up his residence at
the time, and Kondhana (also known as Sinhagad); to Purandars south
stood Rohida. All three forts were in the heart of Shivaji’s mountainous
territory. Jai Singh sent out more than 6,000 troops, ‘led by Daud Khan,
Raja Raisingh Rathod and others’ with orders to ‘depopulate and reduce to
ashes’ the whole region in which these forts lay.21 Reaching the vicinity of
Rohida on 27 April 1665, these generals and their forces ‘set ablaze around
50 villages’, Jai Singh reported to his emperor. Nestling securely in the hills
there were also ‘four populous and prosperous villages where no Mughal
army had ventured before’. This time, the Mughal units reached there and
requested the leadership for reinforcements, which were immediately sent.
The result, Jai Singh wrote, was that ‘the enemy ran away from the villages,
and our armies set fire to all four villages and laid them waste. Many people
and animals were caught and taken prisoner.’22
The approach to Rajgad was more ruthlessly violent: all the villages along
the route were torched and all the lands and cultivation mercilessly
destroyed. By 30 April the Mughal troops had reached the base of Rajgad
and their leading unit ‘even reached up to the fort’s gates’, Jai Singh stated,
‘but those inside didn’t have the courage to come out, so our forces, instead
of just staying there, went out and completely burnt all the villages
nearby’.23 As that part was quite hilly, the Mughals, instead of setting up
camp there, chose a less inconvenient flatland about 7 kilometres away to
put up their tents for the moment, and from there they moved in the
direction of Kondhana, causing large-scale devastation in its neighbourhood
on 2 May.24
Meanwhile, Jai Singh received information that Shivaji was consolidating
his forces near Lohgad, which was to the north-west of Purandar and almost
at the western tip of the Sahyadris, overlooking the coastal parts. He rushed
his already charged-up men there, with more than adequate arms and
ammunition. In the fierce fighting that took place, a Mughal unit led by
Qutubuddin Khan ‘killed several Marathas and injured many, while those
that remained withdrew in the direction of Lohgad’. Continuing their
pursuit, the Mughals ‘set up camp on the ground that stands between
Lohgad and three other forts around it [Visapur, Tung and Tikona]’. Such
was the grip that the Mughals had achieved in a short time, wrote Jai Singh,
that they had ‘defeated the enemy on the Balaghat [hilltops] as well as the
Painghat [bottom of the hills] and totally destroyed enemy territory’.25
As for the siege of Purandar, it was going especially well, and though
monsoon was approaching, the Mughals would have the fort sooner rather
than later, Jai Singh told the emperor. ‘Day and night I am occupied with
the business of the siege,’ he said, adding, ‘thanks to your [Aurangzeb’s]
blessings, things which would have been impossible to do in a month are
being accomplished in a day.’26
It was really a matter of time before Purandar fell to the battery of
assaults. The leader of the Maratha garrison there, Murar Baji Deshpande,
had put up a stiff fight with his men, but it was evident he couldn’t hold out
for long. Murar Baji had earlier worked with the Mores of Jaawali, Shivaji’s
bitter opponents, but after Shivaji took over Jaawali, he had joined him and
had been steadfastly loyal. Seeing 5,000 Mughals led by Diler Khan trying
to ascend the hill towards the bale-killa and sensing the inevitable, Murar
Baji decided to make a dash into the enemy formation. With 700 chosen
Marathas he stormed in, taking Diler Khan’s men momentarily by surprise
because they hadn’t expected such a small group of fighters to make a
sudden and apparently suicidal descent. Murar Baji was bent on making a
final, desperate move. He and his Marathas killed 500 Mughals, Murar Baji
himself cutting his way through into Diler Khan’s own camp with a band of
sixty soldiers.27 Falling slightly back, Diler Khan asked his artillery, archers,
lancers and 1,000 light-armed men to deal with Murar Baji’s smallish
squad. Of these attackers, sixty fell to Maratha blows, and Murar Baji went
all the way up to Diler Khan. Face to face with the Afghal general, the
Maratha commander, according to Sabhasad’s account of the episode, asked
himself how he could possibly ‘show face’ to Shivaji after ‘men cherished
by the favour of the Maharaja [Shivaji]’ were ‘dead’ and decided that he
must ‘rush on straight’.28 According to Sabhasad, a snappy exchange
followed between the two rival captains:
Diler Khan: You take a kaul, an assurance of safety, from me. You are an extremely intrepid
soldier. I will promote you.
Murar Baji: What is your kaul? Do I, a soldier of Shivaji Raje, take your kaul?29
Holding his sword aloft, Murar Baji stepped ahead, but the alert Diler
Khan positioned his bow and arrow for the kill. He struck before Murar
Baji could, snuffing the life out of the brave Maratha commander of
Purandar. Around 300 Marathas died in the desperate fight, while the 400
who survived went back to the fort. Diler Khan, however, was rattled by the
surprise attack and took off his turban, vowing he would put it back on only
after he had captured Purandar. He proceeded to form ‘a rampart of shields
below the portals of the fort’ and moved forward. But the garrison kept
up its spirited resistance, saying, ‘What if one Murar Baji is dead? We are
as brave as he was, and we shall fight with the same courage!’30
Jai Singh himself was exultant at his domination of the war theatre. The
siege of Purandar, he noted, ‘was effectively conducted, five towers and one
battlement were captured by us, his [Shivaji’s] country was plundered by
our cavalry’. He gloated that:
his troops collected in such a long time were seduced by us – because I had by this time by giving
passports and promises of safety summoned to myself many of his cavalry and induced them to
enter the imperial service with proper mansabs [military ranks] and stipends of 10 or 15 [rupees],
and by giving them 10 or 20 rupees above the promised rate in cash from the treasury.31
Worried again about Shivaji and Bijapur joining hands, the wily Jai Singh
had also scared off the Adil Shahi state by issuing a series of threats and
positioning the Mughal armies in strategic places, ensuring that it would
not, for the sake of its own security and survival, want to assist the rebel
Maratha in any way.
With Murar Baji Deshpande and hundreds of other Maratha soldiers gone,
almost all of the territory Shivaji had taken (except for southern Konkan)
more or less overrun, Purandar on the verge of being conquered by Diler
Khan, and other Sahyadri forts similarly threatened by Mughal armies
parked perilously close, Shivaji believed that the best option for him was to
stop fighting and seek acceptable terms. He recognized that if Afzal Khan
was a hard one to tackle and Shaista Khan twice as hard, then this was
several times harder.
Shivaji would not have to take merely one or two but many steps back for
Jai Singh to agree to a peace treaty with him. He had been driven into a
corner. He had the other choice, of course, the choice many a warrior-leader
had made on countless occasions before him, and would make during and
after Shivaji’s times. He could commit hara-kiri; he could self-destruct; he
could go out, as it were, in a blaze of glory, to be remembered like many
battlefield giants as a great martyr to his cause, who did not blink at the
supreme sacrifice. But Shivaji thought twice, thrice, a number of times, and
he made up his mind. He was going to swallow the excruciatingly bitter
pill. This would count as one of the hardest and most wrenching decisions
of his career. He had the far-sightedness to realize that even if it appeared,
in May–June 1665, that Maratha forts would only be somewhat reduced in
number if Purandar and some others like it were taken by the Mughals,
those were extremely critical to his emerging raj. Once they fell, their loss
would translate into pressure on other citadels and on whatever little
territory was still left in his hands. Whichever way he looked at it, he could
only perceive defeat, and if he didn’t concede it now, it would lead to the
extinguishing of his long-held dreams of independent statehood. Shivaji
was going to do everything he could to prevent the blowing out of that
flame. He was going to go through the wringer not to be crushed, but to
emerge beaten but still alive on the other side.
Much before the Purandar siege reached its tipping point, Shivaji had
begun to make overtures to Jai Singh just as he had previously, to Bijapur
as well as to the Mughals, whenever he was in a spot of bother. Shivaji’s
first offer was of assistance to the Mughals in their drive against Bijapur,
which was ‘more likely to succeed’, he said, ‘than a war in his hilly and
intricate country’; in exchange for that, he must be permitted to keep his
forts, his territory and his part of the coastal belt.32 That hadn’t worked.
When the tipping point came at Purandar, Shivaji made a fresh offer. This
one carried a warning. He sent his envoy Raghunath Ballal Atre to meet the
Rajput leader of the Mughal troops and promised tribute and some forts. If
these terms were rejected, Shivaji said, he would ‘restore a part of the
Bijapuri Tal Konkan to the Sultan of Bijapur, join the Sultan and oppose the
Mughals’.33
Jai Singh wouldn’t accept the proposal. He insisted that Shivaji meet him
in person and submit to the Mughal empire unconditionally; only then
might the empire bestow its mercy on him. Atre soon returned to Jai Singh
with a message from Shivaji: he was willing to send his son Sambhaji
across to make the submission. That, too, Jai Singh dismissed out of hand.
Jai Singh had already communicated to Atre that the Mughal emperor had
given him neither the freedom nor the authority to negotiate with Shivaji,
which meant he could hardly hold any conference with him openly. Shivaji
wrote to him that if this was the case, ‘if you cannot publicly grant me [any]
promise and safe conduct, make the same promise in private’, so that he
could come and see him. Jai Singh replied to Shivaji’s envoy on 9 June
1665, saying that if, after having arrived in his camp, Shivaji ‘consents to
obey the Emperors orders, he would be pardoned and granted favours,
otherwise he would be allowed to return in safety to his home’.34 Jai Singh
didn’t want to stretch his advantage to breaking point. He warned
Aurangzeb that his spies had brought him news that the sultan of Bijapur,
who had wrested a few mahals from the Tal Konkan from Shivaji as proof
of his loyalty to the Mughal empire, had ‘secretly promised [Shivaji] every
possible help’ to keep the Mughals at bay To render Shivaji hopeless
would only drive him into an alliance with Bijapur.’35
Jai Singh had set up camp close to the foot of Purandar. He was holding
his durbar there on the morning of 11 June 1665 when, at 11 a.m., Atre
walked in to say Shivaji had arrived, accompanied by six Brahmins and the
bearers of his palanquin. Jai Singh immediately asked two of his officials,
Udairaj Munshi and Ugrasen Kachhwah, to meet Shivaji on the way ‘and
tell him that if he agreed to surrender all his forts he might come, otherwise
he should turn back’. Shivaji answered without hesitation, as if he were
anticipating such an ultimatum, ‘I have entered into [imperial] service.
Many of my forts will be added to the imperial dominions.’36 Satisfied, the
two men led him in, and at the door of Jai Singh’s tent he was escorted
inside by Jai Singh’s aide Jani Beg Bakshi. Jai Singh came forward,
embraced Shivaji and asked him to sit by his side, while two of Jai Singh’s
armed men stood around, keeping guard.
Jai Singh had made preparations for a neat little scene for Shivaji’s eyes, a
scene almost guaranteed to break down any barriers that the Maratha might
still want to keep intact. He had asked Diler Khan and his own son Kirat
Singh, who were in the forward positions at Purandar, to be ready to launch
a decisive attack. The moment Shivaji walked in, Jai Singh sent out word to
Diler and Kirat; on cue, a part of the tent’s curtain was pulled away. It was a
distressing sight for Shivaji to behold: the assault on his stronghold had
been renewed, and dust, smoke and the noise of artillery filled the air. The
defenders hit back, but the attackers evidently had the upper hand, and more
of the garrison lay dead and wounded as fighting intensified. Shivaji
implored Jai Sigh to stop the killing and offered to give up the fort. Jai
Singh replied, to drive the point home, that the Mughals were on the verge
of vanquishing their enemy there. ‘In an hour, in a minute’, the garrison
would be ‘put to the sword’, he said. If Shivaji had an offer to make to the
emperor, it had better be of several other forts, he declared confidently.37
Shivaji did his best to keep his calm and appealed once again, saying he
wanted the lives of his men defending the fort to be spared. Relenting, Jai
Singh sent one of his own officials with a representative of Shivaji to Diler
Khan and Kirat Singh, and the Mughals took possession of Purandar,
allowing its garrison and other inmates to leave.38
The negotiations thus began for Jai Singh on just the right note, and they
went on for hours, with the Rajput prince and two of his fellow
interlocutors, Udairaj Munshi and Surat Singh Kachhwah, being of one
voice and one mind: they wanted Shivaji to surrender all his forts. Shivaji,
of course, was trying to keep as many of them as possible. The high-stakes
talks went on till midnight, and Shivaji, believing Jai Singh’s promise that
he would be unharmed, ended up spending two nights in Jai Singh’s camp
until the final draft of the agreement was hashed out.
It was during his stay in the camp that Niccolao Manucci, the Italian who
had been appointed commander of the Mughal artillery by Jai Singh on this
campaign for a pay of ten rupees a day, met Shivaji.39 Manucci’s memoirs
indicate that Shivaji had created grave apprehensions in the mind of
Aurangzeb and across his empire. He wrote that when Aurangzeb had
called Jai Singh to his court to discuss the Deccan campaign, the emperor
had said ‘he could no longer endure the insults of Shivaji’ and ‘had come to
the resolve that he would go in person against this rebel’.40 The situation
was such that ‘either he should go’ or ‘Rajah Jai Singh should undertake to
suppress Shivaji’, Aurangzeb had said, to which Jai Singh’s reply was that
he would take it upon himself to defeat Shivaji and ‘repress his assaults’.41
The pressure exerted on Shivaji seemed to have not eased these fears
entirely yet. When Shivaji arrived at Jai Singh’s camp, Manucci stated,
‘much anxiety was caused in our camp, everybody assuming that he must
be coming to attack our army’.42 They felt relieved ‘when it was known that
he had very few people with him’, and when Shivaji stayed at Jai Singh’s
camp for the negotiations, ‘a tent was put up for him alongside the rajah’s,
and he had liberty to enter and leave as he pleased; he was always treated
with great honour and respect’.43
Manucci was in the habit of going ‘at night to converse and play cards
with’ Jai Singh. One night the Italian, Jai Singh and a Brahmin in Jai
Singh’s camp were having a game ‘when in came Shivaji’:
We all rose up, and Shivaji, seeing me, a youth well favoured of body, whom he had not beheld on
other occasions, asked Rajah Jai Singh of what country I was the rajah. Jai Singh replied that I
was a Farangi rajah. He [Shivaji] wondered at such an answer, and said that he also had in his
service many Farangis, but they were not of his style. Rajah Jai Singh wanted to do me honour,
and responded that as a rule Nature made a distinction between the great and the humble, and I
being a rajah, she had given me a body and a mind very different from those of others. I rose to
my feet as a mark of recognition for the compliment, and made the appropriate obeisance.44
This opening, Manucci further wrote:
afforded me occasion many times to converse with Shivaji, since I possessed, like anyone else in
the camp, the Persian and Hindustan languages. I gave him information about the greatness of
European kings, he being of opinion that there was not in Europe any other king than the King of
Portugal. I also talked to him about our (Christian) religion.45
Was Shivaji really safe in Jai Singh’s camp? According to Manucci, not
quite: ‘Diler Khan, being habituated to treachery, wished several times to
kill Shivaji, and to this intent solicited Rajah Jai Singh to take his life, or at
least to give him [Diler Khan] leave to do so. He would assume all
responsibility, and see that the rajah was held blameless.’46 As a matter of
fact, Diler Khan was convinced that ‘the king [Aurangzeb] would rejoice at
such a result. For Shivaji’s valour and intrepidity would never give any rest
to the Mogul.’ But Jai Singh, ‘who had pledged his word and oath not to
allow of a murder … never listened to the words of Diler Khan’.47
Two days into Shivaji’s stay, the final agreement, known as the Treaty of
Purandar, which put the Marathas completely on the back foot, was ready.
Shivaji had thirty-five forts with him at the time. Of these, he agreed to
surrender twenty-three or two-thirds,48 of which the annual revenue, put
together, was four lakh hons. He would get to hold the other twelve forts,
with an annual revenue of one lakh hons, ‘on condition of service and
loyalty to the Mughal Empire’.49 Apart from Purandar and Rudramal,
among the forts to be given up were the vertical dynamo Kondhana,
Lohgad, Rohida, Nardurg, Tung, Tikona, Mahuli and others. They were
spread across the Sahyadris as well as the lower part of the Konkan. Among
the ones Shivaji would retain were Rajgad and Rairi, which later became
famous as Raigad.50
One of the terms of the treaty specified that whenever Shivaji was called
upon by the Mughal governor of the Deccan to perform a duty, he had to
render it ‘without delay’.51 To avoid the tag of being a Mughal noble,
Shivaji had asked that he be exempted from mansab (military rank) or
regular service, and the request was granted, chiefly because he did not
openly specify the reason he didn’t want a mansab for himself and said his
son would hold it instead. So Sambhaji, it was agreed, would get the rank of
a commander of 5,000 horses and an equal number of troopers. Because
Sambhaji was still a child, he would be ‘accompanied by Netaji [Palkar],
who is surnamed the Second Shivaji’, when he attended on the subahdar of
the Deccan.52 Shivaji had asked that he be permitted to take all the lands in
the lower Konkan which were under Bijapurs control and also Bijapurs
possessions in the Balaghat or uplands, which both he and Jai Singh
intended to capture. In return he would pay the emperor 40 lakh hons in
annual instalments of three lakh.53
Deprived of a triumphant march into Purandar by the deal between Jai
Singh and Shivaji, Diler Khan was annoyed. So was Daud Khan, who had
destroyed so many villages and torched so many settlements and lands.
Diler Khan in particular had sent Shivaji a nasty letter in reply to his
missive stating that he was willing to give up Purandar. Just over a year
ago, Shivaji had, after having shocked Shaista Khan, sent a letter to senior
Mughal officials across the Deccan, saying that his country was full of hill
ranges and hard and harsh, and had underlined that no invader of his lands
had tasted success. Diler Khan was now taking potshots at Shivaji for the
defiant words he had used not too long ago. He stated in his response,
almost from the very gates of Purandar:
May Good Providence be your helper! My wish to see you is so strong that it is hard to measure it
Your letter, with some palace guards [mahaldars], has been received. It calls for peace. Be it
not concealed from your heart that the words most appropriate for saying on this occasion are
‘First fight and then peace’. If a man craves peace without fighting it sounds as an unbecoming
proposal to the imperial generals, who have come at the bidding of their master from the garden
of Hindustan in order to travel and hunt in your hilly country. They have come solely for this that
you would show yourself in battle. They are guests arrived in this hilly tract with an intense desire
for it but you have not appeared before them! In spite of your many ‘strong forts, sky-kissing
hills, abysmal ravines, and brave soldiers lying in ambush’, you have not once shown any sign of
yourself anywhere. And now you propose peace!54
To assuage the egos of both his affronted generals, Jai Singh, before
sending Shivaji away to his own dominions, ‘mounted him on an elephant’
and asked him to go with his son Kirat Singh to meet Diler Khan at the
machi of the fort and then Daud Khan in his camp for a farewell interview.55
Details of those interviews aren’t available, but Shivaji had to swallow his
pride all over again and have an audience with these generals. What is
evident is that he did not respond to Diler Khan’s provocative verbal
challenge. Shivaji was not in the habit of obliging his opponents whenever
and wherever they sought an open and pitched battle against him. He
preferred to strike at a time and place of his own choosing. On this
occasion, too, he kept his counsel, anxious not to engage in a confrontation
when the enemy was in a far, far superior position. He was quietly settling
into his new, albeit temporarily assumed, identity of a man affirming his
loyalty, and that of his would-be mansabdar son, to the ‘Alamgir or
Emperor Aurangzeb. And if there was anything to salve the wound of his
losses at the moment, he had his own sense of discretion.
Shivaji was to go back home to Rajgad on 14 June. That day, Jai Singh
‘presented him with an elephant and two horses’ and again sent Kirat Singh
with him. Why? Jai Singh was eager that the prized fort of Kondhana be
handed over by the Marathas as soon as possible, and he wanted Shivaji
himself to head there and submit Kondhana’s ‘keys’ to Kirat Singh. At
noon, Shivaji reached Kondhana and delivered the fort to Jai Singh’s son.
From there he set off for home, taking with him another of Jai Singh’s men,
Ugrasen Kachhwah, ‘who was to bring Shivaji’s son away with him’ to the
Rajput general’s camp for grant of commander status.56 Soon the other forts
too were taken, and a proud Jai Singh sent their ‘keys’ to Aurangzeb.57 He
added a personal touch: he would compensate the imperial treasury for what
it had spent on the conquest of Purandar. ‘The conquest of this fort is the
first victory of the Deccan expedition, and my life and service are at the
service of the Emperor,’ he wrote to Aurangzeb.58
Jai Singh had every reason to feel magnanimous in his moment of victory.
He had taken barely three months to get Shivaji to agree to terms
humiliating to the Marathas. He had also got Shivaji to stamp with his own
seal two letters in Persian to Aurangzeb drafted on his behalf by Jai Singh’s
secretary Jairaj Munshi. One of the letters, written in florid, courtly
language, stated that ‘this offender and sinner was deserving of all kinds of
punishment’, yet the ‘gracious and favour-showering imperial court’ had
granted him ‘mercy and grace’.59 Hereafter ‘he [Shivaji] will remain firmly
engaged in performing the Emperors work, as a reparation for his past life
and an amendment of his uselessly spent days; he will never deviate from
his position of rendering service, risking his life and carrying out the
imperial mandates’. He expressed the hope that ‘out of the storehouse of
Your Majesty’s grace, pardon of offences and cherishing of offenders, life
to this slave may be granted, and an imperial firman may be issued
pardoning his offences, granting security to his house and family, and
bestowing life on him’.60
The second letter, sent after Aurangzeb issued him a farman, said:
this sinner and evil-doer did not deserve that his offences should be forgiven or his faults covered
up. But the grace and favour of the Emperor have conferred on him a new life and unimaginable
honour He is confident that, through the grace of God and the lofty fortune of the Emperor,
some valuable service may be rendered by this slave, as amends for his past failings, whereby he
may earn the pleasure of the Emperor and discharge a small part of the heavy debt of gratitude
which he owes for these favours.61
Aurangzeb in his reply severely chastised Shivaji and informed him of the
duties he needed to carry out without any delay. Not for the first time, he
wrote to Shivaji that his crimes were simply too many:
Although the offences committed by you up to now through your thoughtlessness about the
consequences of your acts are beyond count, yet as this devoted Rajah [Jai Singh] has prayed for
your pardon, I, out of my characteristic noble habit of shutting my eyes to faults and granting the
pardon of lives, do forgive your past deeds and sins and grant all your prayers.62
He steered the subject immediately to the planned Mughal strike against
Bijapur. ‘Whenever Jai Singh would invade Bijapur, you would, at the head
of a proper contingent of your own troops, co-operate most heartily with
him and give him satisfaction by the excellence of your service,’ he stated.
Further, Aurangzeb directed Shivaji to ‘always remain firm in fidelity,
devotion and obedience and pay the tribute you have agreed to’. Only if
cooperation and service were rendered in these respects, and only if that
part of the Bijapuri Balaghats (uplands) still held by the Adil Shahi’s forces
was captured by Shivaji and brought under Mughal control would all those
mahals be confirmed in his name, Aurangzeb clarified. In a telling
comment on his approach to Shivaji, he ended the letter with:
out of my practice of cherishing slaves, I confer the rank of 5,000 zat on your son, and I am
sending you this royal edict, stamped with the impression of my royal palm and accompanied by a
splendid robe of honour, in order to exalt your head. You ought to recognize the value of our royal
favour and render thanks … Always remain true and constant in loyalty and serviceableness.63
It was the norm for a ‘slave’ to travel several kilometres to receive a letter
or robe of honour sent to him by the Mughal emperor, and Shivaji would
soon be forced to undergo the additional humiliation of adhering to that
custom. However grudgingly, Shivaji did that too.
Very soon, Shivaji was summoned by Jai Singh to join his new campaign.
Jai Singh wanted to complete his triumph of the Deccan by annexing
Bijapur; confidently, he began his march in its direction on 25 November
1665 with Diler Khan on one side and Shivaji, with his 9,000-strong force
including the senior general Netaji Palkar, on the other.64 Shivaji’s forces,
forging ahead on Jai Singh’s orders, captured four places across the Nira
river in less than a fortnight. First, they took Phaltan, where Shivaji had
some of his kin, and then Tathavdagad, Khatav and Mangalvedha in the
south-eastern parts of Maharashtra as defined by the Marathi-speaking
regions.65 Happy with the reports Jai Singh sent him, Aurangzeb wrote to
Shivaji on 25 December, ‘I have learnt from the despatches that you are,
at the head of a good force, firmly engaged in my service and have exerted
yourself greatly in the conquest of forts Phaltan and Thathvada and in
punishing the Bijapuri army in the Tal Konkan.’ In acknowledgement,
Aurangzeb also sent him ‘a robe of honour and a jewelled dagger along
with the farman.66
Pushing further south, a Mughal contingent led by Diler Khan and Shivaji
took on a Bijapur force of 12,000 which was led mostly by Maratha
generals. One of these generals was Vyankoji Bhosle, Shivaji’s
stepbrother.67 Brother was fighting brother. This time the going wasn’t
smooth as the Bijapuris hit back strongly, but Jai Singh’s forces finally
pushed them back. Seated on the back of the same elephant, Shivaji and Jai
Singh’s son Kirat Singh took the battle to the enemy.68
Shivaji was in the enormously difficult and entirely indigestible situation
of having to fight shoulder to shoulder with his arch enemies like Diler
Khan and Kirat Singh. Diler Khan had brutally and relentlessly bombarded
Purandar and killed many Marathas, including Shivaji’s incredibly brave
loyalist Murar Baji Deshpande. Diler had also written a letter full of
malicious bile to Shivaji when the Marathas had found themselves encircled
and had been forced to surrender that fort. Jai Singh, on the other hand,
might have been outwardly civil and polite to Shivaji, but he was in truth
the hostile Rajput general who had ultimately placed Shivaji in an
extremely difficult position, so fighting alongside Jai Singh’s son Kirat was
equally tough for a man who was so hell-bent on pressing for his own
autonomy and identity. The worst crisis of Shivaji’s political career had
plunged him into this dire extremity: the unwanted company of the openly
hate-spewing Diler and the unsympathetic Kirat.
It is striking how, as the likes of Diler Khan rejoiced as Maratha power
tottered, Shivaji put up with the humiliation, the tragic circumstances forced
upon him, going through the ordeal with silent resentment. Shivaji’s act of
fighting on the same side as his sworn rivals is an exquisite and exceptional
snapshot of his determination to endure. We find here a truly remarkable
survivor. He was trying to preserve whatever he could of his political
project so that he could emerge some day from this period of desperate
uncertainty, hopefully more or less intact and without any lasting
consequences from his present state of helplessness.
It is perfectly possible that many of his followers, even his close
lieutenants, might not have been able to fully comprehend his actions. Did
they really understand what he was doing, how he was prizing keeping his
head above water over everything else so that he and his comrades could
live to fight the Mughal empire another day? Did any of them see in their
beloved leaders conduct authentic echoes of Lord Shiva swallowing the
infernal poison to keep things going, or did they find the whole thing
Shivaji’s decision to give up the majority of his hard-earned forts and to
fight as part of the Mughal army quite inexplicable and a deathly blow to
all their efforts? Did they see the possibilities, however slim they appeared
at that moment, of the paradoxical outcome (involving undeniable defeat
but continued existence) that Shivaji had accepted as against a possibly
irreversibly disastrous one? Or were they convinced that only unmitigated
disaster lay ahead after such capitulation?
There are no records of the discussions that took place in Shivaji’s inner
circle at such an enervating moment, almost nothing that could allow us to
excavate the views of his top lieutenants and close aides. But it seems safe
to assume that acceptance of the difficult decisions might not have been
universal, and that some of the acquiescence would have been reluctant, if
not proffered after protest. Many would have endorsed, or been easily
drawn into endorsing, an all-or-nothing approach, a fight to the finish at that
precise moment. They might have seen the move to surrender forts as
deeply alarming in its apparent promise to the Mughals of complete
eventual takeover and triumph.
Shivaji was seeing things the other way. It was not as if a wipeout was
certain if he decided to still contest Mughal claims over his lands and forts.
The outcome of such a struggle was unknown; and later, in fact, Jai Singh
failed in his attempt to wipe out Bijapur in similar fashion. But the
handover of his forts, Shivaji reasoned, was going to give him precious
breathing time to gather his wits, build up his resources further, instil even
more fighting spirit in his Mavale, and then come back to fight the very
fight his followers wanted to fight one to the finish. His policy of four
steps forward and two steps back had all along allowed him to enlarge his
dominions, slowly but surely, and he wanted to eliminate the possibility of
total annihilation by accepting a retreat in time. The difference, if any, with
his colleagues, was over the timing of the big fight.
Whatever the differences and whatever the reverberations of his tough
decisions, what we know for sure is that they did not open up any chasm
amid the crisis. The loyalty of all of Shivaji’s lieutenants and followers who
remained with him those who had not fallen prey to Jai Singh’s offers,
and there were plenty of them remained natural and unaffected. The
exception was Netaji Palkar, whose desertion was soon thereafter caused by
his dismissal and not by differences over military strategy. In sum, Shivaji’s
men stood united behind him, continuing to see him as a revolutionary
leader ultimately committed to the goal of independent statehood. The
absence of any serious jolt to their convictions about Shivaji and his
leadership in this great crisis showed both the firm and solidly dependable
nature of that leadership and the steadfast nature of the followers’ loyalties.
Meanwhile, buoyed by the fresh success against the Adil Shahi forces, Jai
Singh chose to make the final thrust into Bijapur and was taken by surprise
by the readiness the opponent demonstrated in defence. Having arrived
within 16 kilometres of the Adil Shahi capital, the Mughals were compelled
to beat a retreat in the first week of January 1666. This was largely because
Jai Singh had, underestimating his rivals, neglected to carry big artillery and
other equipment for a siege, whilst Bijapur had increased the strength of its
garrison and laid waste territory up to about 10 kilometres, making the
supply of basics and even of water difficult for the invaders.69
When the Mughal army retreated to a place about 25 kilometres from
Parenda in mid-January 1666, Shivaji offered to go to Panhala near
Kolhapur and seize it. As he told Jai Singh in a conversation the Rajput
later mentioned in his report to Aurangzeb, he knew ‘all the ins and outs’ of
Panhala,70 where he had been besieged for months until he had escaped
from under the watchful eye of Siddi Jauhars Bijapur army. Thereafter, the
Marathas had surrendered the fort to the Adil Shahi. Shivaji promised Jai
Singh, ‘I shall raise so much disturbance in that district that the enemy will
be compelled to divert a large force from their army to oppose me.’71
Jai Singh wrote that he accepted the idea because Shivaji’s ‘words bore
promise of action’.72 There was nevertheless another reason for him to give
the nod without a moment’s hesitation. The latest Mughal retreat had
resulted in a blame game of sorts in the Mughal camp, and the faction led
by the powerful Diler Khan was pointing fingers at Shivaji, indicating that
the Maratha either didn’t have his heart in the campaign against Bijapur or
was actively in collusion with the emperors enemies. Entirely mindful of
Dilers vehemence against Shivaji from the time the Afghan had offered to
eliminate him and take responsibility for the killing and when he had
written a disdainful letter to the Maratha over the surrender of Purandar, Jai
Singh felt it might be a good idea for Shivaji to be elsewhere for a while.73
Rather perplexingly for Shivaji, his assault was quickly repulsed by
Bijapurs defenders atop the fort of Panhala, and he had to make a retreat to
Vishalgad. Just a little over five years ago, he had undertaken a similar
journey from Panhala to Vishalgad, getting away from Siddi Jauhars grip.
While that was a triumphal escape, this time the getaway was extremely
disconcerting. Why did it happen, he wondered, and discovered that his top
general Netaji Palkar and his unit had not arrived in time to support him.
Shivaji was very, very upset, and Netaji Palkar was peremptorily dismissed
as commander-in-chief of the Maratha forces. In his place, Kudtoji Gujar,
another highly competent general who was then heading the forces at
Rajgad, was appointed the sarnobat or chief of the military, and given the
title of ‘Prataprao’ – broadly, ‘the man of brave exploits’.74 ‘Why didn’t you
turn up when you were asked to?’ Shivaji asked Netaji Palkar, making no
attempt to hide his anger and disappointment.75 Distressed over his removal
and upset with the scolding he had received, Netaji Palkar went and
promptly joined the Adil Shahi state.
Jai Singh was puzzled and worried. Just what was going on? Was this a
genuine rift, or was it Shivaji himself who had planted Netaji there? Netaji
Palkar had a robust enough reputation of his own. Jai Singh had referred to
him as ‘the Second Shivaji’ in his letters to Aurangzeb. What if Shivaji
himself defected and went back to his old ways soon? The momentary
stalling of his Bijapur campaign was one thing, but Jai Singh did not want
his grand success against Shivaji to be squandered and was anxious to do
everything in his power to prevent a joining of hands between Shivaji and
Bijapur. To add to his worries, the Qutub Shah of Golconda had, without
warning, decided to extend his assistance to Bijapur in its defence against
the Mughals. Two well-established Deccan kingdoms had come together.
They were gradually weakening powers and could be handled, though it
was going to be a tough task. Shivaji represented a new power, on the other
hand and new powers and the people associated with them often have a
sense of purpose, a sense of resolve, and a sense of mission. When almost
everything had been lost for Shivaji and his men, Murar Baji Deshpande,
the commander of Purandar, had exemplified that sense of mission. It was
absolutely urgent for Jai Singh to ensure that Shivaji’s rebellion did not get
a fresh lease of life.
With that end in mind, he had already started selling to Shivaji, even
before his own reverses against Bijapur and Shivaji’s reverses at Panhala,
the idea of going north for an audience with the emperor. Such an audience,
he believed, could solidify the connection between the emperor and his
‘slave’. Once Shivaji saw the splendour, grace, power and glory of the
famous jewel-studded Peacock Throne of the Mughals, he would not
rethink his position or entertain thoughts of rebellion again but would be
eager and happy to wield power as one of the Mughal empire’s leading
generals in the Deccan. The turn of events early in 1666 made Jai Singh
intensify his pitch, to Shivaji as well as to Aurangzeb, in his dispatches to
the north. Jai Singh wrote to the emperor, ‘Now that Adil Shah and Qutb
Shah have united in mischief, it is necessary to win Shiva’s heart by all
means and to send him to Northern India to have audience of Your
Majesty.’76 And when Aurangzeb agreed, Shivaji, no matter how unwilling,
was left with little choice.
He didn’t want to go. One of the conditions he had stipulated – and got Jai
Singh to concede during negotiations was that he would neither hold
military rank himself in Mughal service nor be obliged to attend the
emperors court. Yet Jai Singh held out all kinds of promises to him and, to
use his own words, ‘used a thousand devices’ to convince him.77
Shivaji had absolutely no trust in Aurangzeb. If the likes of Diler Khan
bore him ill will, then Aurangzeb, who had neutralized and murdered three
of his own brothers to get hold of the Mughal crown, was all the more
likely to do so. Diler Khan had been itching to kill Shivaji in Jai Singh’s
camp close to Purandar. What would the infinitely more powerful
Aurangzeb do to him in the Mughal capital? He knew that in Aurangzeb’s
eyes he was an upstart who had simply too much gall for someone who had
inherited neither a state nor a kingdom. How had he dared even conceive of
cocking a snook at the Mughals in the Deccan, plundering their territories,
including the precious town of Surat, attacking their much-feared military,
and worst of all, chopping off the fingers of a leading Mughal general who
also happened to be Aurangzeb’s own maternal uncle? Shivaji was well
aware these were the resentments that the Mughal emperor harboured as far
as he was concerned.
Some Maratha chronicles indicate Jai Singh told Shivaji that the emperor
could grant him viceroyalty of the Deccan and that Shivaji was open to that
possibility.78 None of the Persian documents breathes a word about any such
offer, though most historians have kept an open mind on the subject and
feel the viceroyalty might just have been a bait that was dangled, along with
the handover of Janjira, the fort of the Siddis, and one of Shivaji’s near-
obsessions; almost right from the start of his political and military career,
Shivaji had tried to conquer Janjira, but despite a number of attempts, it had
somehow remained beyond his grasp and was at that time directly under
Mughal control.79 The other theory, put out by Sabhasad,80 is that Shivaji
had offered to capture the Adil Shahi and Qutub Shahi kingdoms for the
Mughals during his talks with Jai Singh, and an audience with Aurangzeb,
he thought, could help him to gain quick sanction for such an enterprise.
While he would first seize the two Deccan kingdoms with the weight of the
Mughal forces, he could afterwards cast off his shackles and use the gains
thus accrued to strike out on his own again, efface the enormous losses he
had suffered, and take on the Mughals afresh, with renewed vigour.
Whether this was true or not, such an approach was far from inconsistent
with the strategies Shivaji had employed earlier, of playing an eager-to-
serve supplicant for a while in order to be able to later assert his freedom
and sovereignty. One British historian of the Mughal empire writing in the
early twentieth century felt that it would in fact be in accordance ‘with the
whole bent of his peculiar genius’.81
Still, what of the most important question of personal safety? Here
again, Jai Singh made all kinds of promises, including religious ones as a
fellow Hindu,82 vowing that no one would even touch Shivaji, so he needn’t
have any apprehensions on that count. Moreover, one of Jai Singh’s sons,
Ram Singh, would be present at Aurangzeb’s court, and Jai Singh was
going to direct him to escort Shivaji and look after him while he was there.
Initially, Shivaji was meant to visit Delhi, where Aurangzeb had been
based and from where he had ruled for quite some time. Early in 1666
the venue shifted to Agra. On 22 January 1666, Shah Jahan, who had been
imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb inside Agra fort from 1658 and was being
looked after by his three daughters, died at the age of seventy-six.
Following Shah Jahan’s passing, Aurangzeb shifted his court from Delhi to
Agra. Aurangzeb was feeling far more assured of his position now than he
had ever done before: even the ailing father was finally out of the way.
Shivaji, on the other hand, was going through the worst phase of his career.
He had suffered his greatest defeat and, to put it in Aurangzeb’s own words,
was having to make a visit to Agra ‘for the purpose of saluting the threshold
of my Court’.83
Could things get any worse for Shivaji?
Perhaps they could. So, before he left for Agra, Shivaji devised proper
plans for what would happen in his absence in his own dominions. His
mother Jijabai would hold charge as the regent, and she would be assisted in
the running of affairs by the prime minister, Moropant Peshwa, Nilo Pant
Mujumdar, the chief accountant who would take care of the finances and
the coffers, and the new sarnobat, Prataprao Gujar.84 To ensure that things
went smoothly in his lands regardless of what fate had in store for him in
Agra, Shivaji made a visit to many of the forts he still held, reiterating the
rules he had previously laid down for their commanders and asking them to
be extremely alert; similarly, he ordered the civil administration to follow
the procedures and practices he had instituted.85 Jai Singh wrote to
Aurangzeb later that Shivaji’s preparations were such that his state would
function smoothly in his absence.86
On 5 March 1666, Shivaji proceeded from his premier fort Rajgad for
Agra. He was accompanied by his son Sambhaji, who was just nine years
old. The top officials and associates he had picked to accompany him were
Niraji Rauji Sahana or Kotwal, Trimbak Sondev, son of Shivaji’s official
Sonaji Pant Sondev, Manko Hari Sabnis, Dattaji Trimbak, Hiroji Farzand,
Raghoji Mitra and Davlji Gadge. There were 1,000 Mavale besides, and
3,000 of his military.87 Aurangzeb had sanctioned one lakh rupees as costs
for Shivaji’s journey from the Deccan exchequer, and an officer from Jai
Singh’s army, Ghazi Beg, was to be Shivaji’s guide along the way.88
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 80–81.
Mehendale (English), 299.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 80; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 131.
Mehendale (English), 298.
Jai Singh’s letter to Aurangzeb which mentions details of all the rulers and people he was trying to
recruit against Shivaji is part of Haft Anjuman, a collection of his missives to the emperor while he
was on the Deccan campaign. Several of these letters, which are in Persian, have been translated by
Jadunath Sarkar in English and are part of House of Shivaji. They have been translated more
exhaustively in Marathi by the historian Setumadhavrao Pagadi and are part of Samagra
Setumadhavrao Pagadi, Vol. 3, edited by D.P. Joshi and Usha Joshi (Marathi Sahitya Parishad,
2010).
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 61.
Mehendale (English), 304–305.
Extract from Haft Anjuman quoted in Mehendale (English), 304.
Ibid.
Ibid., 301.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 140.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 85.
Mehendale (English), 301.
Ibid., 302.
B.M. Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Uttarardha [Part 2].
Haft Anjuman, quoted in Pagadi, Samagra Pagadi, Vol. 3, 68.
Ibid.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid.
Ibid., 72.
Ibid.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 74.
Sabhasad, 53; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 92–93.
Sabhasad, 53.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid.
Haft Anjuman, quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times.
Jai Singh’s letter to Aurangzeb, quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 93; Sarkar, House of
Shivaji, 134.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 134.
Ibid., 134–135.
Ibid., 134.
Ibid., 135.
Ibid., 136; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 94; Kincaid, The Grand Rebel, 192.
Mehendale (English), 312.
Manucci, A Pepys of Mogul India, Vol. 2, 121.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid.
Ibid., 136.
Ibid.
Ibid., 136–137.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid.
Ibid.
The exact percentage is 65.7. I have rounded it off for clarity.
Ibid.
Ibid., 137–140.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid., 143–144.
Ibid., 144.
Diler Khan’s letter to Shivaji, June 1665, translated by Jadunath Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 149–150. I
have retained Sarkars original text except in a couple of lines where the translated words sounded
particularly archaic. Thus for the line ‘My wish to see you is so strong that it baffles measuring’, I
have replaced ‘baffles measuring’ with ‘is hard to measure it.’ Similarly, for the line ‘It treats of
peace’, I have written, ‘It calls for peace.’ The rest is the same.
Ibid., 138.
Ibid., 138–139.
Ibid., 139.
Ibid.
Shivaji’s letter to Aurangzeb, June 1665, translated by Jadunath Sarkar, ibid., 148.
Ibid., 148–149.
Shivaji’s letter to Aurangzeb, September 1665, ibid., 153–154.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 151.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Shivaji of 5 September 1665, ibid., 150–152.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 98.
Ibid.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Shivaji, 25 December 1665, quoted in Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 157.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 99.
Ibid.
Ibid., 99–100.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 78.
Ibid.
Ibid., 102.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 103.
Ibid., 103–104.
Ibid., 104.
Sabhasad, 59.
Sidney J. Owen, The Fall of the Mogul Empire (John Murray, 1912), 66.
Ibid.
Aurangzeb’s letter to Shivaji, 5 April 1666, quoted in Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 157.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 104–105.
Ibid.; Mehendale (English), 322–323.
Mehendale (English), 323.
Sabhasad, 60–61.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 105.
OceanofPDF.com
10
Showdown and Escape
When Shivaji reached the gates of Khadki, one of his first stops on the over
1,200-kilometre-long journey to Agra, he discovered that his reputation had
preceded him. In an age when there were no newspapers to signal his
impending arrival, crowds had lined the streets to watch his entry into the
Deccan town that Aurangzeb had renamed Aurangabad, after himself.1 The
Mughal emperor had apparently sent word to his officials that when Shivaji
passed through their territory on his way to Agra, he should be received
with honour. However, it turned out that the town’s Mughal governor Saf
Shikan Khan had sent his nephew to welcome Shivaji, while he himself
remained holed up in his durbar, waiting for the Maratha leader to come
calling. When the nephew relayed these expectations to Shivaji, the latter
retorted, ‘Who is Saf Shikan Khan? What does he do here? And why isn’t
he here before me?’2 When Saf Shikan Khan discovered that the visitor had
taken umbrage at his absence, he developed cold feet and immediately went
to Shivaji’s quarters, taking along all his important officials.3 While
welcoming him, Shivaji did not come all the way to the door, to show his
displeasure.4 The next day, however, when he paid the governor a return
visit, he appeared to have forgotten the previous evening’s incident, treating
the Khan with the civility and decency befitting his position.5 It was an
early taste for Shivaji of the intricate games he would have to play to keep
his honour intact while dealing with the Mughals.
Shivaji had been asked to be present in Aurangzeb’s court on 12 May
1666. The day was of great significance to the Mughal court: it would mark
the sixth Mughal emperors fiftieth birthday according to the lunar calendar.
A show of extraordinary pomp had been planned. The Mughal empire,
known for its ostentatious ways, had ordered a mammoth 1,400 carts to be
brought all the way from Delhi loaded with all the glitzy paraphernalia
possible, to light up Aurangzeb’s new imperial durbar in the city of the Taj
Mahal, where his father now lay buried next to his wife Mumtaz Mahal, in
the tomb he had built for her.6
Shivaji made sure he too arrived in style. Accompanying Shivaji,
according to an eyewitness account of his arrival in Agra, were 250 men
mounted on horses, 100 with horses of their own and the rest of them
bargirs or those with horses given to them by the state they represented.
When Shivaji rode out in a palanquin, several tall, well-built men wearing
Turkish caps walked ahead of him, while a hundred banjaras or porters
walked at the other end of the entourage. Before Shivaji’s palki also was an
advance guard of troopers, their horses marked by gold and silver trappings,
and a team of his loyal Deccani Mavale, and right in front of the palanquin
strode a large elephant carrying his flag. Shivaji’s silk flag was orange and
vermilion with gold decorations. His senior officials rode in their own
palanquins, though Shivaji’s stood out for the silver plates across its body
and golden ones at its poles. Behind him were two female elephants, each
with her own haud or howdah. The contingent was small, by Mughal
standards of strength, but it was ‘very splendidly equipped’.7
The official in Jai Singh’s employ who penned this account was
particularly struck by Shivaji’s personal appearance. ‘Lean and short, ‘very
handsome and wonderfully fair in complexion’ was how he described him;
he further remarked:
Even without finding out who he is, one does feel instinctively that he is a ruler of men. The mere
sight of him is enough to tell that he is a very brave, high-souled man. He keeps a beard. His son
is nine years old and is very marvellously handsome in appearance and fair in complexion.8
However, the Maratha leaders impressive bearing and elaborate entourage
did not ensure him a warm reception. Aurangzeb had instructed Jai Singh’s
son Ram Singh, who was to be Shivaji’s chaperon, aide and minder
throughout his stay at the Mughal court, to ‘advance one day’s march from
Agra and welcome Shivaji on the way and conduct him to the capital’. But
when Shivaji arrived on schedule on 11 May at the serai of Maluk Chand
some kilometres outside of Agra, after three months of almost non-stop
travel in the sweltering summer heat, he discovered Ram Singh had sent
one of his clerks, Munshi Giridhar Lal, to meet him. It was a blatant snub:
Ram Singh, who was not a particularly exalted official (he had to his credit
a modest rank of 2,500 horses, which meant those many horses and a
proportionate number of horsemen were under him; sometimes, one horse
would have more than one horseman), hadn’t made himself available
despite the emperors orders.
Far from making amends the next day, Ram Singh busy with the task
entrusted to him, of placing patrols in the area around Aurangzeb’s palace
once again sent off his clerk to escort Shivaji to Agra. He then belatedly
rode out to welcome him, but by a route different from the one Shivaji was
meant to take.9 The two men eventually came face to face at the Nurganj
garden. One of Jai Singh’s officials later wrote that ‘Shivaji wished it in his
heart that the Kumar should make the first move by advancing and
receiving him’, so he stayed where he was. ‘Then the Kumar himself
moved forward and embraced Shivaji, who was still seated on his horse’s
back.’10 The point to be noted here is that Ram Singh hadn’t got off his
horse to welcome Shivaji.11
The delays caused by these shambolic arrangements meant that there was
no time for the entourage, already discontented by its reception, to rest. It
got worse. Thanks to Ram Singh’s tardiness, they missed the Diwan-e-Aam,
where both high officials and the hoi polloi were granted an audience. It
was at the Diwan-e-Khaas, for a select audience, chiefly senior officials,
that Shivaji finally laid eyes on Aurangzeb.
Seated on his throne, Aurangzeb was the master of all he surveyed: a
lavishly decorated, canopied marble hall with big pillars; a long line-up of
nobles and other officials who stood in the best of robes, their hands in front
and mouths shut in dutiful silence; courtiers in their green tunics and black
turbans, with lances in their hands, who moved back and forth, ushering in
and leading back guests and others who were brought in humbly before the
throne; and expensive goods that were always being offered and
especially on the occasion of the emperors fiftieth lunar birthday for
weighing him in gold and silver. All the gifts gathered would then be
distributed among the emperors favourites as a sign of his imperial
beneficence. When Aurangzeb was informed that Shivaji had arrived, he
asked the bakshi or paymaster Asad Khan to bring him forward so that he
might grant him an audience.12
Led up to the emperor, Shivaji bowed thrice in front of him and presented
him with 1,000 mohars (pieces of gold) and 2,000 rupees as nazar
(presents) and 5,000 rupees as nisar (propitiatory offerings). Shivaji’s son
Sambhaji’s offerings 500 mohars and 1,000 rupees as nazar and 2,000
rupees as nisar were similarly placed in front of the throne.13 Aurangzeb
didn’t utter a word of acknowledgement or greeting, or offer a gesture of
even mild recognition.14 Instead, Shivaji was escorted back from the throne
by court officials and made to stand in a line on the right meant for paanch
hazari officials or those with a rank of 5,000 horse, which was the third row
of ranking officials.15 The proceedings of the court continued, as if nothing
had happened. It was as if no one had noticed that Shivaji had greeted the
emperor – or if they had, had promptly forgotten.
Shivaji’s mind was in a state of intense turmoil. What was going on? First
the botch-up when he was just about to enter Agra, followed by this grating
display of imperial indifference. And Jai Singh, adept at handing out
assurances, had forgotten about his promise of a mansabdari or authority to
Shivaji to stamp out both the Adil Shahi and Qutub Shahi in the
Deccan.When Shivaji, with rows of officials blocking his view of the
emperor, questioned Ram Singh, and learnt from him that he was standing
among the paanch hazaris,16 he flew into a rage.
What? My son is nine years old, and he was made a paanch hazari without even having to turn up
before the Emperor in court. Netaji Palkar, who works for me, is a paanch hazari. After all the
services I have rendered, and after having come all the way to the court, is this low rank what I’m
going to get?17
Shivaji then demanded to know the identity of the official standing right in
front of him. Ram Singh answered that it was Maharaja Jaswant Singh of
Navkot in Marwar, and Shivaji turned apoplectic. ‘An umrao like Jaswant
Singh? My soldiers have seen the back of him! Why should I stand behind
him?’18 Barely a couple of years ago Shivaji’s soldiers had foiled Jaswant
Singh’s assault on Sinhagad without much difficulty, forcing him to turn
around.
Meanwhile, the ceremonies for the emperors birthday were under way.
Betel leaves were distributed, and Shivaji received one too. The khilats or
robes of honour were given out next, and Aurangzeb’s wazir Jafar Khan got
one, as did Jaswant Singh, who stood in front of Shivaji but not Shivaji
himself.19 At this, he ‘became sad and fretful’, and ‘his eyes became wet
with anger’, recorded one of Ram Singh’s officials.20 Aurangzeb noticed the
hubbub and told Ram Singh, ‘Ask Shivaji what ails him.’ Shivaji replied to
Ram Singh, ‘You have seen, your father has seen, your padshah has seen
what a man I am, and yet you have deliberately made me stand so long. I
cast off your mansab. If you wanted me to stand, you should have done it
the right way.’21 In an instant he turned his back to the throne and began
walking away. Ram Singh caught hold of his hand, but Shivaji shook it off,
went to one corner or recess of the durbar and sat there. Ram Singh
followed him and tried to calm him down, but he was too disturbed to
respond. He exclaimed, ‘The day of my death has arrived. Either you kill
me or I will take my own life. Cut off my head if you like, but I am not
going to stand in front of the Emperor again.’22
Kumar Singh went to the emperor and, trying to attribute the fracas to
Shivaji’s long journey and the exhaustion it had caused, said: ‘The tiger is a
wild animal of the forests. He feels hot. Something has happened.’23 May in
Agra was undoubtedly ferociously hot, but that, of course, was not the
reason for Shivaji’s displeasure. Aurangzeb then ordered three of his
nobles, ‘Multafat Khan, Aqil Khan and Mukhlis Khan’, to ‘console Shivaji,
invest him with a khilat and lead him back to the (imperial) presence’.24 But
Shivaji did not agree.
I won’t accept the robes. The Emperor has deliberately made me stand behind Jaswant Singh. He
knows what kind of a man I am, yet he has willfully kept me standing. I decline the Emperors
mansab. I will not be his servant. Kill me, imprison me, if you like, but I won’t wear the khilat.25
Aurangzeb, watching from the throne, then asked Ram Singh to take
Shivaji back with him to his quarters, to speak to him, and to calm him
down. They could both return to court the following morning, he said. But
Shivaji was in no mood to be pacified. The only thing he reluctantly agreed
to, after an hour of persuasion, was to send his son Sambhaji to court. The
next day, Sambhaji appeared before Aurangzeb with Ram Singh and was
given a full robe.26 When Aurangzeb asked Ram Singh where Shivaji was,
he answered, ‘He had fever and therefore will not come today.’27
Aurangzeb had acted to a plan. Shivaji was the most trenchant, the most
stubborn of rebels. He had had the temerity, in Aurangzeb’s opinion, to
attack Mughal lands, loot entire prosperous cities, and carry out a stealthy
night attack that had sent a fancied Mughal governor and close relation of
the emperor scurrying for cover. He was pronouncing himself a free man in
the Deccan, in the face of the full might of the Mughal empire. And wasn’t
he the one who had warned all the Mughal generals that they would drown
in a river of blood if they tried to conquer his lands? Aurangzeb’s idea was
to deliver a deliberate snub to Shivaji, and he had done it in such a way that
every one of the generals, rajas and maharajas present in court could see it.
He had barely acknowledged Shivaji’s presence and, after giving him little
or no time and absolutely zero attention, had made him stand in a row of
junior officials. A chastened rebel was, for Aurangzeb, better than a dead
one who might become, in the eyes of his people, a martyr and inspire them
to rebellious deeds. A chastened rebel, especially a man of such pride and
of those famous tiger claws as Shivaji, also served as an example for others
who might be getting ideas into their heads. If the bold and fearless Shivaji
could be subdued thus, the rest of you are easy pickings, the emperor was
telling all the officials in the court of private audience where the man from
the Deccan had stood with his son.
And what explained Shivaji’s angry outburst in court? Most historians
have referred to his act of speaking out against his humiliation as the proud
pronouncement of a rebel who just wouldn’t take things lying down. Of
course, the deep voice that rose inside the marble pavilion was that of a
confirmed and adamant rebel. But it was more than that. Shivaji was giving
expression to the realization that his worst apprehensions had come true. He
had never wanted to travel all the way, over a thousand-odd kilometres, to
be present in front of Aurangzeb in his royal durbar. He had zero desire to
be part of Aurangzeb’s circle of patronage. He saw the emperors officials
who bent before the ‘Alamgir and raised their right hands thrice to their
foreheads to indicate that the soil beneath his feet was holy enough for
them to place on their deflated domes – as despicable. He knew what was in
store for him: as a defeated rebel, he would be humbled more and possibly
demeaned more in the presence of the emperor, whom he had already
accepted as his overlord when he had agreed to give up the majority of his
forts. He did not require any more humbling.
But Jai Singh had cajoled him, and Shivaji had allowed the Rajput general
to persuade him, however reluctantly, to proceed to faraway Agra.
Aurangzeb had himself said that Shivaji should be received well and treated
with respect. And Jai Singh possibly, though we don’t know for sure
had held out the possibility of the emperor granting Shivaji viceroyalty of
the Deccan, which the Maratha could use to his advantage before eventually
discarding the garb of loyalty. Shivaji’s natural instincts and his native
intelligence had militated against taking any of these assurances or
promises at face value, and indeed he had not done so. Yet, placed firmly on
the back foot by Jai Singh and the serious reverses he had suffered in the
Deccan, he had finally agreed to go when he could very well still have
refused. He had already lost a great deal, and there wasn’t much else he was
going to lose if he didn’t see his chief rival Aurangzeb face to face. And yet
It was this that had gnawed away at Shivaji’s proud heart and his sense of
self as the inevitable happened inside the court. And at the act of humbling
in the durbar itself, he had left the inhibition of the defeated rebel behind, as
if he were liberated by the proof, so stark and visible, of his deep conviction
that the pursuit of freedom was just the right purpose he had chosen for his
life, and that Aurangzeb was a man too vile and crude to treat him as
anything better than a low-life slave. Whatever Shivaji’s achievements, his
bravery, his acumen, his acuity and his actions, Aurangzeb would always
view him in this light the very way Shivaji hated being looked at. It was
also the way he had always hated the people of the Deccan to be viewed by
the Mughal empire and by the many sultanates that had flourished for so
long. Wasn’t his fight precisely against that kind of treatment? Against the
unjust trampling of children of the Deccani earth, the real children of the
land?
After the commotion in court, those who were looking for an opportunity
to instigate an already displeased emperor to act against Shivaji, got down
to business at once. What better moment could there be? There were two
groups of instigators: a Rajput group hostile to Jai Singh and those who had
been adversely affected in the past by Shivaji’s actions. Their refrain was:
Who is this Shivaji that in your royal presence he behaved with such insolence and yet Your
Majesty permitted his conduct? If this goes on, many petty landholders will come here and act
like him with impunity. How will the government run then? News will travel that a Hindu
displayed such audacious rudeness, and everyone else will begin to be rude.28
Jaswant Singh, whom Shivaji had spoken of scornfully while standing
behind him, said to Aurangzeb, ‘Shivaji is a mere bhumia [small
landholder], and he displayed such discourtesy and violence! It is up to
Your Majesty if you want to overlook it. But he ought to be punished.’Shah
Jahan’s eldest daughter, and Aurangzeb’s sister, Jahanara, who had been
receiving, on her fathers orders, all of Surat’s customs revenue, which
amounted to lakhs of rupees every year, told Aurangzeb: ‘He (Shivaji) has
plundered Surat, he has carried away Shaista Khan’s daughter, and acted
with such rudeness And you ignore it! Is this advisable?’29 (The story
about him carrying away Shaista Khan’s daughter was a false one that had
been making the rounds.)Shaista Khan’s sister, who was Aurangzeb’s grand
wazir Jafar Khan’s wife, urged her husband to tell the emperor that the
attack on her brother ought to be avenged. Shaista Khan himself sent a
message to his brother-in-law, saying, ‘Shivaji is intensely perfidious. He is
learned in the black arts. When he came into my camp, he jumped over 40
yards and entered the house. The Badshah should not call such a man for an
interview. If he is called, he will make a treacherous attack.’30 Pushed by his
wife as well as her brother, Jafar Khan promptly passed on their messages
to Aurangzeb.
By now it had come ‘into the Emperors heart, or the policy was agreed
upon in the Secret Council’, wrote one of Jai Singh’s officials, ‘either to kill
Shivaji or confine him in a fortress or throw him in prison’.31 Shivaji had
suspected something like this would happen soon and had called his
officials for a discussion on how they could get out of Agra before
Aurangzeb had them surrounded. ‘The Badshah will not give us leave
unless we undertake to render some service to him,’ Shivaji told his men,
and asked his official Raghunath Pant Korde to carry a petition to
Aurangzeb.32 In it Shivaji offered to conquer for the empire the two
southern sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda; he also noted that if he were
given a private interview with the emperor, he would ‘meet and
communicate something important’ to Aurangzeb.33 This proposal was an
attempt by Shivaji to get out of the emperors grasp. Aurangzeb didn’t take
the bait and simply wrote in reply, ‘Wait a little, and I will do what you
have asked for,’34 which Shivaji took to be a non-committal response
indicating there was ‘suspicion in his [Aurangzeb’s] mind’. Soon after,
Shivaji heard that the wazir Jafar Khan had ‘slandered him before the
Badshah’; he sent Raghunath Pant to him with a request for a meeting. It
was granted, and Jafar Khan heard him out and even said he would petition
the emperor to grant Shivaji a mansab, but Shivaji came away with the
impression that Jafar Khan hadn’t liked the drift of the conversation, and
had ‘not spoken frankly’.35
Barely twenty-four hours later, Aurangzeb issued instructions to the police
chief of Agra, Siddi Fulad, to put Shivaji in the house of Radandaz Khan,
which suggested punitive action was imminent. Radandaz Khan had been
appointed commander of the Agra fort on account of his ruthlessness and
lack of scruples, and prisoners were sent to his ‘house’ to be subjected to
inhuman treatment. As well known for his bigotry, which had increasingly
begun to appeal to Aurangzeb, as his cruelty, Radandaz Khan would, in just
a few years’ time, help the Mughal emperor crush the Satnami sect of the
Hindus in Alwar, for which he would also get a promotion and the title of
Shujat Khan. What Aurangzeb was signalling by asking for Shivaji to be
sent to the Khan’s ‘house’ was that he immediately wanted harsh
punishment for Shivaji and was not in favour of a graduated approach that
escalated penalty over time.
Greatly hurt by this decision because it was now his fathers ‘word of
honourat stake Ram Singh, who had himself treated Shivaji so casually
and shabbily at the time of his entry into Agra, went to Aurangzeb’s chief
paymaster Muhammad Amin Khan and said, ‘His Majesty has decided to
kill Shivaji. But he has come here under my fathers guarantee of safety. So
it is proper that the Emperor should first kill me and only then put Shivaji to
death or do anything else with him as he pleases.’36 To this, Aurangzeb
asked if Ram Singh would sign a security bond for Shivaji’s conduct to
prevent any escape bid and pre-empt any mischief. Ram Singh duly signed
the bond, prompting Aurangzeb to keep the bond and remark, ‘Go to Kabul
with Shivaji. I’m posting him there under you.’37
The plan was for Ram Singh to deploy Shivaji in the fight there against
the recalcitrant Yusufzais and Afridis, but that was not the crux of the
matter. It was that Radandaz Khan had been appointed to command Ram
Singh’s vanguard on the march to Kabul. According to Aurangzeb’s design,
Shivaji was to be murdered there in cold blood, with the murder
subsequently dressed up as an attack by hostile forces or a pure mishap or
even suicide. ‘The plan of killing was decided upon,’ wrote Jai Singh’s
official.38 This was deemed by Aurangzeb to be a safer method of
elimination in that he could disown responsibility and prevent any possible
uprising of the Marathas on hearing of their leaders death.
But Aurangzeb also didn’t want to alienate his considerably efficient
Hindu mansab holder Jai Singh, who had after all delivered Shivaji to him.
He wrote to Jai Singh at the same time asking him about the precise
assurances he had given to Shivaji as the Maratha was complaining of a
breach of promises.39
The journey to Kabul would be deferred until Jai Singh replied from the
Deccan, where he was still reigning. Shivaji used this window to bribe the
wazir Jafar Khan and some other officials, with the result that the wazir
presented Shivaji’s petition to the emperor and said he ought to be pardoned
for his offences.40 Acceding to his prime ministers request, Aurangzeb
cancelled the ‘go to Kabul’ order but in a parallel move, ordered guards to
be posted around Shivaji’s camp, making him effectively, if still not
literally, a prisoner.
In the last week of May 1666, Shivaji sent a fresh plea to Aurangzeb,
through the bakshi Muhammad Amin Khan, offering to pay the emperor
two crore rupees if all the forts he had recently ceded to the Mughal empire
were restored to him and he was permitted to go back home.41 It provoked a
furious response, with Aurangzeb saying, ‘He [Shivaji] has gone off his
head because of my mildness towards him. How can he be allowed to go?
Warn him that he must not visit anyone, not even go to Ram Singh’s
camp.’42 He couldn’t step out any more and would remain confined in his
quarters, which consisted of a cramped room surrounded by a very small
courtyard. Now Shivaji was officially a prisoner.
Moreover, Aurangzeb had begun demanding of Shivaji that he should give
up all his forts to the empire. Since he knew the Deccan so well, Aurangzeb
realized that among the twelve forts Shivaji still clung on to were at least
three important ones: Rajgad, Raigad and Torna. They could keep him, his
ideas and his ambitions afloat and prevent his total annihilation. What
Aurangzeb eagerly desired, however, was his complete ruin, and saw as
now being easily possible with a single powerful blow. When Ram Singh
asked him to surrender the remaining forts, Shivaji said to him sardonically,
‘Your father gave the Emperor 23 of my forts and got Tonk pargana [in
Rajasthan] as his reward. You are now trying to get my other forts for the
Emperor. What pargana are you thinking of gaining by doing that? Is it
Toda?’43
Shivaji then sent out another petition to the emperor, once again through
the bakshi Muhammad Amir Khan whom he had bribed. ‘I am willing to
cede all my forts to His Majesty as my tribute,’ he wrote. For that, ‘Let him
permit me to go to my own country. My mere sending orders from here will
not do, as my officers will not obey them. If I go there, I shall fight them
and hand the forts over to the imperial agents.’ Aurangzeb remained
unimpressed and declined, asking, ‘Why does he need to go there in order
to hand over the forts to me? Will not his men yield them if he writes to
them?’44
At once, the survelliance of Shivaji’s camp was also intensified, and just a
few days later, in early June 1666, a substantial force equipped with
artillery was stationed outside Shivaji’s quarters, with the police chief Siddi
Fulad himself pitching his tent there.45 There seemed to be no way out.
Jai Singh’s reply had in the meantime reached the emperor. He had stated
that as nothing was promised to Shivaji beyond what was stated in the
Treaty of Purandar, ‘nothing could be gained by imprisoning or killing
Shivaji as the Maratha chiefs wise arrangements [at the time of leaving for
Agra] had made his government independent of his personality’, and
‘imperial interests would be best promoted by turning Shivaji into a friend’.
Such an approach ‘would also convince the public of the sacredness of the
imperial officers’ words’, he wrote.46 Yet Jai Singh, who had in the early
part of Shivaji’s visit to Agra said the emperor should send the Maratha
leader back, was now decidedly against Shivaji’s return to the Deccan! Jai
Singh had come to the conclusion that the campaign against Bijapur was his
own priority, and Bijapur could best be handled if Shivaji was away in Agra
and not in a position to suddenly change sides and join hands with that
Sultanate. ‘Under the present circumstances it is not at all politic to permit
Shivaji to come to this region,’ he wrote to his emperor.47 He told Ram
Singh:
Also tell the Emperor that Shivaji should be detained there in a worthy manner [that is, not as a
prisoner], so that his officers here may not despair of his return and thus be induced to join Adil
Shah and create disturbances against us. This policy will avoid the necessity of His Majesty
sending a fresh army to this side.48
Aurangzeb, of course, was sure he had got his man and didn’t want to
follow Jai Singh’s advice of not keeping Shivaji as a prisoner; Sabhasad
wrote that Shivaji at this stage himself ‘began to feel distressed’ and
‘lamented much, holding Sambhaji Raje to his breast’.49
Over the next few days Shivaji reflected deeply on his predicament, which
was actually a life-and-death situation. He came to the conclusion there was
no point further petitioning the Mughal emperor or sending messages to
him through his officials by either winning them over or offering them
inducements.
In a series of well-thought-out moves, he first asked Ram Singh to
withdraw the bond he had signed for his security and conduct, which the
latter would not do. Instead, Ram Singh tried to ‘reason with Shivaji and
console him’.50 Shivaji then directed his officials and the rest of his
entourage to go back home. Aurangzeb and his officials were only too
happy to grant them travel permits to return to the Deccan. If Shivaji,
already in confinement, was letting go of the Mavale, the 2,500-strong band
of soldiers he had brought along, most of his top officials and aides, who’d
be left behind? He would have hardly any allies to rely on if he were
planning anything deceitful or treacherous. He would only have with him
the nine-year-old Sambhaji and a handful of aides to attend to essential
matters. When most of his men had left Agra, Shivaji wrote to the emperor
a final petition of sorts was how he intended it to sound to say that he
wished to renounce the world and go to Varanasi or Benares to lead the life
of a Hindu mendicant who had given up the worldly pulls of sansar.
Aurangzeb replied, cleverly, ‘Let him turn a fakir and live in Allahabad fort.
My subahdar there will take good care of him.’51 In the fort of Allahabad
were state prisoners who had been cast away.
Weeks passed in this fashion, and Shivaji, now in the final stages of
planning yet another daring escape, pretended to have fallen very ill. He
bought various kinds of sweetmeats and ordered them distributed in wicker
baskets to some Mughal officials and some holy men of the Hindu and
Muslim faiths.52 These were big baskets, each of them hanging from a
wooden pole that needed two porters to shoulder it. Guards initially asked
where the baskets were being sent and what they contained, and they had
the bearers open some of the baskets to check that they were, indeed,
carrying sweets. The watch was kept up diligently for a few days, after
which it started slackening, with the guards no longer keen on checking
baskets and only occasionally asking for one or two to be opened.53
During the afternoon of 17 August 1666, Shivaji informed his guards that
he was extremely unwell and should not be disturbed. Hiroji Farzand,
Shivaji’s half-brother (Shahaji’s son by another woman) and aide, who
resembled him, lay flat on the wooden bed that Shivaji normally occupied.
A quilt covered his body. The only part of his body that was visible was his
right arm, which was stretched out. On the wrist was Shivaji’s golden
bracelet. A young servant sat by his side on the ground massaging his feet.
Shivaji and his son Sambhaji squeezed themselves, as noiselessly as
possible, into two separate baskets. Like the other baskets, filled with
sweets as usual, the two baskets, with their lids shut, were carried out of the
camp by bearers, past the rows of guards, a little after sundown.54 At an
isolated, desolate spot outside the city, the baskets were placed by the
bearers in front of some of Shivaji’s karkuns or clerks whom he had sent
out earlier from the camp after having fixed a meeting point. When the lids
of the baskets were thrown open, Shivaji and Sambhaji clambered out of
them. They then travelled almost 10 kilometres further to a village, where
one of Shivaji’s trusted officials, the kotwal Niraji Raoji, was waiting for
him with horses. Shivaji, his son and some of those accompanying them
smeared themselves with ash and dressed like renunciates, in the orange
robes of sanyasis. They then proceeded in the direction of the holy city of
Mathura; some others took a different route home.55
Back in Agra, Hiroji Farzand slept in Shivaji’s bed for the night. In the
morning, some guards peeped in and noticed his outstretched arm with the
golden bracelet. At around 8 a.m., Hiroji walked out of the house with
Shivaji’s servant, telling the guards posted outside the gates to the quarters
that they should not make too much noise as Shivaji was ill, and was
undergoing treatment; he himself was stepping out to get some medicine for
the master with the servant in tow, and no one must be allowed in.56 When
neither Hiroji nor the servant returned, the suspicions of some of the
sentries were aroused, and at around 10 a.m., they went inside the house to
check. The room was empty.
The British, who recorded the story of the great escape in a letter sent
from Surat to England,57 should have used the colloquialism ‘gobsmacked’
to describe the reaction of the guards who found that Shivaji and his son
had disappeared. If ever the word was fit to be used, it was in this instance.
The guards ran to the police chief Siddi Fulad, and he in turn ran to
Aurangzeb. The British had already described Shivaji as being of an ‘airy
body’, and the Mughals had begun to echo this description after the Shaista
Khan episode. Siddi Fulad claimed there had been witchcraft to try and
absolve himself. He told Aurangzeb:
The Raja was in his own room. We visited the room repeatedly to inspect, but he disappeared all
of a sudden. Whether he has fled, or entered into the earth, or gone up in the sky – we don’t know.
We have been very close to him. He vanished in our view. We don’t know what magical trick he
has played.58
Aurangzeb was far too rational to believe such tales, and he ordered a
massive search across Agra and all along the route to the Deccan.
But Shivaji was more than twelve hours ahead of his pursuers. And he
didn’t head directly to the south or south-west in order to get to the Deccan.
Against all expectations, he went in the opposite direction – to the north and
north-west, making a brief halt in Mathura and from there drawing an arc
through Bundelkhand, Gondwana and Golconda to get to his section of the
Deccan and his home at Rajgad.59 Little Sambhaji found it hard to keep up,
so he was left behind in Mathura with three Deccani Brahmins Krishnaji
Pant, Kashi Rao and Visaji who were brothers-in-law of Shivaji’s peshwa
Moropant Pingle.60 Shivaji told them he would send them a message once
he reached Rajgad, after which they could bring his son to the Deccan.
Aware that he was in the vicinity of some of Hinduism’s holiest spots, but
had no time to visit them, he told the Brahmins, ‘Get religious rites at Gaya
and Prayag performed for me through men you know.’61
Shivaji then shaved off his moustache and beard, and once again donned
the garb of a sanyasi, smearing himself with ash. He carried a sanyasi’s
staff, with gold coins and money concealed within it to pay for his expenses
on the long journey back. Money was also apparently sewn into the clothes
worn by his men.62
Shivaji returned to Rajgad on or about 12 September 1666, around twenty-
six days after he had escaped from under Aurangzeb’s nose.63 The journey
he made from Mathura was more than a 1,000 kilometres long, and he had
obviously travelled at tremendous speed.64 As soon as he returned, he
circulated the rumour that his son Sambhaji had died along the way.65 When
this became well known, he let the three Brahmins in Mathura know that
they could leave for the Deccan with his son, and they too set off dressed as
mendicants.66
Shivaji had managed an almost miraculous escape from the Mughals, but
not without cost to himself. He fell quite ill, evidently as the result of the
sheer exhaustion of the frantic journey, but eventually made a full
recovery.67
Escaping in a wicker basket, Shivaji had made the entire, giant Mughal
empire a laughing stock. In Agra, a furious Aurangzeb instituted an inquiry
into the grand fiasco. He asked the wazir Jafar Khan to give him the names
of all the mansab holders, cavalrymen and guards who had been entrusted
with the responsibility of keeping a watch on Shivaji. He asked the police
chief Siddi Fulad to give him a sketch of all the checkposts set up around
Shivaji’s quarters.68 Mughal horsemen set off at full gallop from Agra and
went all the way to Rajasthan, Gujarat and Khandesh, the usual route to the
Deccan which Shivaji had avoided. They came back empty-handed, of
course.
Not surprisingly, Ram Singh’s name came under a cloud, and rivals like
Jaswant Singh did their bit to incite Aurangzeb against him.69 According to
various reports, some Maratha associates of Shivaji were arrested in Agra,
from the house of the son-in-law of the chief Mughal spy, Pratit Rai.70
Those arrested were Raghunath Pant Korde, Trimbak Pant and three others,
according to one version; other versions say Trimbak Pant was among those
who accompanied Shivaji during his escape.71 There is not enough
information available to reconcile these conflicting accounts, so we will
never really know for sure who these men were. The captured Marathas,
reportedly tortured, apparently admitted that Ram Singh had asked Shivaji
to escape, if not actively connived in the escape.72 The Marathas were kept
behind bars before being released the following year. Four guards who had
stood outside Shivaji’s quarters were imprisoned, ‘threatened with lashes
and the thrusting of salt into their nostrils’ and forced to ‘confess’ that Ram
Singh had let Shivaji escape; they later retracted their statements, saying
they had made them fearing torture.73
Ram Singh paid heavily for such allegations. He was soon dropped from
the court on Aurangzeb’s orders and deprived of his position and pay.
Almost a year later, after his father had died, he was brought back into
service and given the rank of 4,000 horse. Sent to Assam as part of the
Mughal force tasked with winning back the fort of Guwahati from the local
Assamese, Ram Singh spent a few months there before being sent to the
north-west frontier, where he died of an illness in 1668.74
Raja Jai Singh’s career started nosediving the moment news emerged that
Shivaji had escaped. Apart from his son being accused of collusion, there
was also the fact that Shivaji’s soldiers in the Deccan were beginning to flex
their muscles again. The Mughal commander of Rohida fort, among the
twenty-three forts Jai Singh had obtained from Shivaji, was complaining
bitterly of a lack of supplies and warning of an accumulation of war
materials by Shivaji’s men in the fort’s vicinity.75 The war against Bijapur
too had gone nowhere after a promising start. To make the disgrace worse,
Shivaji returned safely to Rajgad in September. It was not easy now to
replicate Jai Singh’s previous successes against Shivaji. There was a loss of
morale, and a sense of annoyance, exhaustion and massive embarrassment
over Shivaji’s escape.
Jai Singh, who had advised Aurangzeb to treat Shivaji well, albeit for
strategic reasons, and been civil with the Maratha leader during his fraught
encounters with him, was now thirsting for his blood. He outlined in a letter
to the Mughal wazir Jafar Khan a plan to murder Shivaji by deceiving him
with an offer of marriage between one of Jai Singh’s sons and one of
Shivaji’s daughters. Jai Singh said he would invite Shivaji to his camp to
discuss it, though he added, spewing venom, that Shivaji’s ‘pedigree and
caste’ were ‘notoriously low’ and ‘men like me do not eat food touched by
his hand, and in case this wretch’s daughter is captured I shall not
condescend to keep her in my harem’.76 Once things were ‘arranged in such
a way that the wicked wretch Shivaji will come to see me once’, Jai Singh
emphasized, ‘in the course of his journey or return our clever men may get
a favourable opportunity of disposing of that luckless man in his unguarded
moment at some place’.77
Nothing came of the plan as it remained unapproved in the wake of the
fresh debacle, and Jai Singh, dispirited and discredited, was relieved of his
charge as governor of the Deccan and replaced by Prince Muazzam in May
1667.78 That was the final blow: the same Muazzam, deemed indolent and
inefficient, whom Jai Singh had not wanted to take orders from as governor
of the Deccan and had therefore pleaded with Aurangzeb for autonomy in
decision-making, was replacing him barely two years later. How the tide
had turned. A disconsolate Jai Singh started on his journey back to
Rajasthan but never reached. He died on the way, at Burhanpur, on 28 July
1667.
The question that still hung in the air and is still often debated is: was Ram
Singh truly involved? Did he assist Shivaji in his escape?
Two British historians of the Marathas, Grand Duff and Scott Waring, feel
that Ram Singh did help Shivaji whereas the eminent historian Jadunath
Sarkar, whose discovery of Rajasthani letters (written by Jai Singh’s
officials) in the Jaipur state archives threw much light on the whole drama,
stayed firmly non-committal, as have others. The one exception among
recent historians has been A.R. Kulkarni, who has given Ram Singh a clean
chit.79
My own conclusion is that Ram Singh had no role to play in Shivaji’s
escape. Shivaji had bribed the Mughal wazir Jafar Khan, the bakshi
Muhammad Amir Khan, and some others, but there is no evidence that Ram
Singh had been dealt with similarly. He passed on Shivaji’s messages to the
emperor diligently, and sometimes spoke up for him, but in the end, he
always did Aurangzeb’s bidding, urging Shivaji to cooperate with the court
and to even hand over the remaining forts in the Deccan to Aurangzeb. The
fact that both men belonged to the same faith doesn’t appear to have come
into play, because Jai Singh’s family was thoroughly committed to the
Mughal rulers. Ram Singh did indeed console Shivaji in moments of
despair, but that could be attributed to pure civility.
The allegations against Ram Singh by certain Mughal officials, and the
insinuations made against Jai Singh, were part of the power play at
Aurangzeb’s court. Those who were going to be censured themselves for
Shivaji’s inexplicable vanishing act needed to hold someone else guilty.
And they did.
Shivaji, meanwhile, had emerged an even bigger hero in the eyes of his
people, and the story of his incredible escape became something of a folk
legend even during his lifetime.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 105.
Bhimsen Saksena, Tarikh-e-Dilkhusha (Persian), translated by Setumadhavrao Pagadi in Marathi,
Samagra Pagadi, Vol. 3, 218, English translation is mine; Mehendale (English), 323. Saksena was a
chronicler who was a kin of a Mughal official posted in the Deccan at the time of Shivaji and
Aurangzeb, and was present in Aurangabad when Shivaji reached there on his way to Agra.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 105.
Mehendale (English), 323.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 105.
Ibid.
All these details are in a letter of 29 May 1666 written by Jai Singh’s officer Parkaldas, based in
Agra, to Jai Singh’s diwan Kalyandas, based in Amber. The letter has been reproduced in full by
Sarkar in Shivaji and His Times, 105–106, and by Mehendale in Shivaji: His Life and Times, 324 –
it is from these two sources that I have drawn the details.
Quoted in Mehendale (English), 324; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 106.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 109.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 160.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 109; Mehendale (English), 326.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 109.
Ibid., 110.
Ibid.; Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 4, 102 .
Sabhasad, 63; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 110; Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 4, 103.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 110; Mehendale (English), 326; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 160.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 160.
Ibid., 161; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 110.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 63.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 161.
Ibid.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid.
Ibid., 163; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 112.
Ibid., 163–164.
Sabhasad, 65.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 164.
Sabhasad, 64.
Ibid., 64–65.
Ibid., 65; Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 4, 104.
Ibid., 65–66.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 112; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 164.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 165.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 112–113.
Mehendale (English), 329.
Ibid., 330; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 170–171.
Ibid.
Ibid., 170–171.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 113; Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 168–169; Mehendale (English), 330;
Sabhasad, 66.
Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 4, 107.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 171.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 66.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 170.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 113.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 115; Sabhasad, 67.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 115.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 116; Sabhasad, 68.
Their letter has been quoted in Krishna, Shivaji the Great, Vol. 1, Part 2, 261–262.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 116; Sabhasad, 69–70.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 117.
Ibid.; Sabhasad, 71.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 117.
Mehendale (English), 339.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 175.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 118; Mehendale (English), 338.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 118; Mehendale (English), 339.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 175.
Mehendale (English), 335.
Ibid., 334.
Ibid., 335.
Ibid., 335; Sabhasad, 68, 72.
Mehendale (English), 335.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 173–174.
Mehendale (English), 341–342; Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 116.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 119.
Haft Anjuman, quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 120.
Ibid.
Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 4, 113.
Kulkarni, Medieval Maratha Country, 59–73.
OceanofPDF.com
11
A Push for Reforms
Shivaji himself had no time to savour his breathtaking escape from Agra.
He was a hero, no doubt, but one who had lost time, men, materials,
resources and the majority of his forts. His closest aides, like Raghunath
Pant Korde and Trimbak Pant Dabir, were languishing in a dungeon in Agra
following his own escape from the Mughal capital. It would be several
months before they were released. Fortuitously for Shivaji, Aurangzeb’s
attention was taken up, soon after his audacious exit from the imperial
court, by a threat of invasion by the Shah of Persia and a rebellion by the
Afghan tribes along the Mughal empire’s north-west frontiers. Eventually
the Persian king, Shah Abbas II, an upholder of Shia Islam (as distinct from
Aurangzeb’s championing of the Sunni branch), didn’t carry out his threat,
but he handed over instead an acerbic letter for the emperor to Aurangzeb’s
envoy at his court, Tarbiyat Khan, in which Shivaji figured prominently.
‘I learn that most of the zamindars of India are in rebellion because their
ruler is weak, incompetent and without resources. The chief of them is the
impious kafir Shiva,’ he wrote.1 Shivaji, noted the ruler of Persia,
had long lived in such obscurity that no one knew his very name; but now, taking advantage of
your lack of means and the retreat of your troops, he has made himself visible like the peak of a
mountain, seized many forts, slain or captured many of your soldiers, occupied much of that
country, plundered and wasted many of your ports, cities and villages, and finally wants to come
to grips with you. You style yourself a world conqueror [Alamgir] while you have only conquered
your father and have gained composure of mind by the murder of your brothers. It is beyond your
power to repress lawless men.2
The bearer of the taunting letter bore the brunt of Aurangzeb’s anger: he
was accused of being irresponsible and robbed of his rank.3
Shivaji, meanwhile, decided to buy time by making a new offer of peace,
and Aurangzeb’s reciprocal time-buying tactic was to accept the offer with
alacrity. Shivaji wrote that he had fled from Agra not out of insubordination
but in fear of his life, and that he was worried the emperor had already sent
an army against him, ‘which no one in the world … could fight’. He sought
pardon, saying that in the emperors service lay his own welfare. His son
Sambhaji would render that service with a contingent of 400 troopers. If the
Emperor chose to give Sambhaji, who was only nine years old at the time, a
mansab, good; if he didn’t, Sambhaji would still serve. He had already
given up his forts, Shivaji wrote, and added that the strongholds that
remained, and his life itself, now belonged to His Majesty.4
Aurangzeb knew Shivaji far too well by now not to be taken in by his
renewed affirmation of loyalty; Shivaji was once again, as earlier, adroitly
avoiding the role of a mansabdar himself so that he did not hold any
position within the very empire he was fighting against. But the statement
of loyalty nonetheless suited Aurangzeb for the moment, because he wanted
to focus on the instability in the north, and not on the Deccan. He wrote
back to say that Shivaji’s offences stood ‘pardoned’ and that his son
Sambhaji ‘had been enrolled as an imperial officer’.5 Shivaji could seize
parts of Bijapur and add them to Mughal territory or stay firm in his own
territory, Aurangzeb said. Shivaji had complained in his letter that imperial
collectors were impeding his effort to collect rent in his own fiefdom,
despite the emperor having given him deshmukhi rights in the areas around
the surrendered forts.6 Aurangzeb got these rights restored.7 He went a step
further, granting Shivaji the title of ‘rajah’, something he had rejected
outright when Jai Singh had recommended it for the Maratha after the
Treaty of Purandar.8 ‘Rajah’ didn’t mean much more than titular pretension;
Jai Singh was a ‘rajah’ in Aurangzeb’s service, and so were many others
like Jaswant Singh.
Aurangzeb’s real opinion of Shivaji had been expressed more frankly in
the wake of his escape. When Shivaji was under house arrest in Agra, he
had asked some Mughal couriers to carry his pearls, hons and gold mohars
home. Midway to the Deccan the couriers heard of his escape and, returning
to Agra, handed over everything to the emperors officials, fearing they
would be implicated in the escape. Aurangzeb’s wrathful pronouncement
was that it was all haram [illegal] property’. He asked for the goods to be
sold and the proceeds ‘distributed among fakirs’.9 Aurangzeb was even
harsher with Netaji Palkar, the former chief of Shivaji’s army. Netaji had,
after his estrangement with Shivaji, first joined Bijapur but had soon
afterwards gone over to the Mughals. Though now a Mughal ‘commander
of 5,000 horse’ and stationed in Agra and other parts of the north, Netaji
was imprisoned at once, ‘lest he too should run away’. When he offered to
turn Muslim if his life was spared, he was, according to the Alamgir-nama,
converted, circumcised, given a new name, Muhammad Kuli Khan, and
‘posted to the army of Kabul’.10
Shivaji, momentarily left alone by the Mughals, was able to establish a
degree of quiet. As he saw it, if Aurangzeb believed that he feared reprisal
after his escape and had slunk away to safety, it would be an advantage. It
would give him the breathing space he needed to rebuild, and to prepare for
a fresh round of resistance to the Mughals in the future. While his battle-
hardened army got a much-deserved rest, Shivaji himself wasn’t planning
on resting. He wanted to use this time to carry out urgent administrative and
legislative reforms. He had come to the conclusion that the lands that were
still his were reeling under constant warfare and the administrative
inefficiency and corruption brought on by the overlordship of several
sultanates. He felt governing structures needed to be changed and
improved, and measures taken to curtail the unlimited and unrestrained
jurisdiction of certain privileged fief holders.
Thus began a new phase in Shivaji’s life. For three years on the trot, he
made no moves that would invite Mughal retaliation. Instead, he focused
his energies on his lands, working tirelessly and not allowing
disappointment over loss of territory to stand in the way of his mission. He
also carried out far-reaching reforms in the functioning of his military
forces. His thinking was that once his reforms gathered pace and took root,
and members of his military state and its citizens saw for themselves the
changes he had achieved, he could move from there, in a new surge of
activity and battlefield oomph, towards regaining all his lost realms.
So it was that soon after his return from Agra, Shivaji asked one of his
senior officials, Annaji Datto (who later became his minister for land
revenue), to carry out the measurement of his lands so that new rules could
be set for revenue collection. The watandari system was the root of most
ordinary people’s troubles in that period, and Shivaji carried out a major
revision in the way it was run. The system was not altogether without merit:
the roles performed by deshmukhs and deshkulkarnis in other words
zamindars who collected revenue from cultivators and passed on a share to
the state and by mirasdars and others, provided a measure of stability to
village administration even in the midst of conflict. But land and revenue
collection rights had become hereditary over centuries, spawning fratricidal
conflicts and blood feuds. Also, the system squeezed the peasantry, who
were forced to pay exorbitant sums to these rights holders, of which only a
small part was sent to the state exchequer. Such an arrangement also meant
that no matter who was ruling a region, watandars were non-accountable
and unmoved by any change in authority; they simply transferred their
allegiance to the new rulers. And the common people had no one to turn to
for redressal if the local watandar didn’t provide a just administration.
Shivaji fixed revenue dues in cash and grains ‘according to the yield of a
village’.11 Officials could no longer extract rents arbitrarily, but only
according to centrally fixed rates. Wealthy watandars had taken to building
castles (wadas) and bastions in the villages. Shivaji demolished these
edifices and barred these officials from building any ‘bastioned castles’.
They could only build houses, he told them, like the rest of the population.12
Another rule he introduced was that ‘every government servant, civil or
military, officer or ordinary soldier’, would be ‘paid directly by the
government – either in cash or by orders of payment on the treasury’.13 This
was meant to end random collection and misappropriation. If officials could
not pay themselves, casual decentralization could be checked, felt Shivaji.
For agriculture, Shivaji adopted the batai system where farmers paid a
share of their actual produce to the state. He chose this over the bighawani
system that was just as widespread, under which tax was levied at flat rates
determined by quality of land. Annaji Datto wrote to watandars that they
should, roping in responsible individuals in their villages, do their own land
surveys; he himself would select one village in each district for a sample
survey and compare the results of the two surveys, theirs and his, to arrive
at the right revenue settlement figure.14 Shivaji decided that an estimate of
crop per bigha would then be made, and ‘after dividing the grains into five
shares’, ‘three’ would be ‘given to the cultivators and two taken for the
government’.15 Later, the share of government was raised to 50 per cent.16
For the state to demand such a high share of crop revenue was significant.
But with Shivaji, 40 per cent or 50 per cent meant just that. Earlier,
whatever the written rules stated, collections were random, unsystematic,
indiscriminate and without any proper count or assessment made by
anyone, and the people and peasants found themselves harried and hassled.
Shivaji had in fact started implementing a similar set of rules in the twelve
Mavals near Pune soon after he had shifted to Pune in his teenage years.
Gradually, as his territories grew, so did the scope and scale of
implementation, and a semblance of order began to spread across the land.
After the Agra drama, he focused far more stringently on establishing this
order properly.
That’s why none of his enemies could cite a single instance of the local
population in any of Shivaji’s administered regions protesting or rebelling
against the rules he was putting in place. So many of Shivaji’s territories
had been destroyed, repeatedly so, for more than a decade. Whether it was
Afzal Khan or Shaista Khan or later Jai Singh, entire villages were laid
waste by each one of them, people were displaced, houses burnt and
properties destroyed. Why did the local populace (as distinct from some
watandars), whose members comprised Shivaji’s army, then still stick with
Shivaji when they could have easily taken shelter under the umbrella of the
bigger, far more established and older powers? Why were they backing this
newbie champion of the Deccan? It was because someone whose house had
been left in a smouldering ruin by a powerful army could expect from
Shivaji’s rule a degree of justice, of fairness and of method in the midst of
all the early modern age warfare.
Apart from Shivaji’s charismatic personality, and his personal bond with
his men, this was another reason why someone like Baji Prabhu Deshpande,
who had served other powers as well in the Mavals before Shivaji’s advent,
had laid down his life for the intrepid rebel. It also helped explain why a
man like Murar Baji Deshpande, who could have easily taken up the
prominent post offered to him by the Mughal general Diler Khan, instead
chose to die in the act of protecting Purandar. Baji Prabhu and Murar Baji at
least gained immortality; the Marathas who died alongside them a few
hundred in each incident are nameless, their identities obscure and
forgotten. Bravery cannot fully explain their sacrifice: they clearly saw
themselves as being part of a cause, and they perceived the cause to be
worthy enough for them to stake their all on it. They were convinced that
Shivaji was the man who needed to be in charge if they, their families and
their children were to have a better future. Shivaji’s genius lay in creating
this sense of belief, and self-belief, in the ordinary, faceless and nameless
people of the Deccan.
Shivaji also fostered confidence among the people by tackling one of the
most daunting challenges confronting both ruler and populace in that era:
the problem of too many wastelands and how to make them useful and
bring livelihood to the local people and revenue to the state.
In order to encourage cultivation, Shivaji instructed that ‘new farmers who
come to settle should be given cattle and grain and money for
providing themselves with seeds’. These were not intended as gifts: he said
‘the sum should be realized in two or four years according to the means of
the rayats (peasants)’.17 In a letter to an official in the 1670s, Shivaji said if
a farmer had the ability and workforce to till his land but no oxen, he should
be given cash to buy oxen and the advance later ‘realized gradually and
according to his [the peasant’s] ability without charging any interest’.18
Funds were set aside for such assistance so that wastelands could be
brought under cultivation. Similarly, land was granted rent-free for
establishing a market town, and though customs duties were retained as
earlier, in an important reform measure, the many taxes and cesses routinely
imposed were all abolished by Shivaji once the batai system was
introduced.19
There were invariably those who resisted change. For instance, a temple
complex at Chinchwad near Pune had for long been given the privilege of
buying goods from neighbouring districts at concessional rates, and the loss
thus suffered by the exchequer was recovered by imposing taxes on local
residents. Shivaji had put an end to all taxes by bringing in the crop-sharing
arrangement, yet the temple authorities continued to buy from farmers at
cheap rates and locals continued to be taxed as well by the district
authorities. Learning about these twin blows, Shivaji wrote to the district
subhedar asking him not only to at once stop imposing taxes because
cultivators were already paying half their produce to the state but to forbid
the temple establishment from purchasing goods at low rates from farmers.
He ordered the subhedar to send the temple complex provisions from
government stocks at subsidized rates.20 Though a devout Hindu, Shivaji
did not see respect for faith as a grant of licence for religious establishments
to cause trouble or harm to the local population. He may not have put it this
way, but this was, in a small yet important way, a separation of church and
state.
In the Deccan, the mansab holder was also the jagir holder with the right
to collect taxes. Shivaji stopped appointing jagir holders altogether in his
territories, eliminating a line of authority that had become notorious; taxes
were collected by the administrative in-charge already in place, the one
holding a clerical and purely administrative position not the watandar
with hereditary rights but a state-appointed official specifically for that task.
Shivaji’s other, equally momentous achievement during this phase was to
underline that the civilian system of administration was as significant as
military preparedness, efficiency and valour. Sure, the conquest of new
lands was a perennial pursuit with him, just as it was for the other powers.
But his peacetime measures showed how much more there was to him, and
how keen he was to establish a stable and just new order.
As we have seen, every state in the Deccan in the seventeenth century was
a military state, and almost every civilian official was at the same time a
military official. Naturally, there were times officials saw greater glory in
military duties. In 1670 Nilopant Sondev, whom Shivaji had appointed
chief of finance, requested him to appoint someone else while he himself
went off to capture some forts. Shivaji in his reply firmly emphasized that
‘to stay in the country for administrative work was also an important task’
and directed him to focus on the region’s affairs. Nilopant, in turn, reading
and interpreting Shivaji’s message accurately, acknowledged that if Shivaji
Raje ‘considers both these duties as equal, I shall stay in the country’.21
Shivaji’s military was entirely his own creation. All his life he focused on
building forts and fortifying existing ones, knowing his greatest strength lay
in their unassailable character. He focused equally on the bravery of his
men, the Mavale, and appealed to their Maratha pride to fuse them into a
unit and drive them to greater feats. But discipline was key, and he
emphasized that ‘every pass’ be ‘commanded by forts’, that ‘regular
fortifications’ bar ‘all open approaches’, and ‘every steep and overhanging
rock’ be ‘occupied as a station to roll down great masses of stone’.22
Shivaji mandated, in keeping with the established rules of the age, that
three officials of equal status and responsibility assume charge of every fort.
These were the havaldar (commander), the sabnis (officer in charge of
accounts), and the sarnobat (who held charge of personnel at the ramparts).
A hands-on karkhanis doing commissariat work would assist these three,
affixing his seal to orders before the three signed, overseeing stores of
grains and war materials, verifying roll calls and details of cash and treasury
department arrangements, requisitioning goods and commodities, and
overseeing construction work. The karkhanis reported directly to the sabnis,
who was ultimately responsible for all accounts. The sabnis, besides,
carried out correspondence with government or other officials.23 This was
not very different from what the other powers were doing; as the following
example illustrates, it was the actual implementation that was different,
heralding the start of an era.
In one respect the havaldar of Shivaji’s forts had unfettered authority: the
keys of a fort would always be with him, and he was to shut and lock the
fort gates every evening. In the morning, he’d go out again to open the main
gates.24 According to an incident cited in a Maratha chronicle, Shivaji went
up to Panhala one night, and guards at the gates told the havaldar the
Maharaj was seeking entry. The commander, after checking, disallowed
him, saying the king’s own orders prohibited him from opening the gates.
When Shivaji told him ‘the regulations are mine and the order involving
their breach is also mine’, he still refused. In the morning the havaldar
opened the gates and, with folded hands, asked the king for punishment, but
the king instead voiced his appreciation for the man’s sense of duty.25
Conscious of caste rivalries and intrigues, Shivaji specified how
appointments at forts were to be made. While the Ramoshis and Parwaris
‘kept watch’ at the gates,26 Sabhasad writes that Shivaji had instructed
the garrison in the fort, the havaldar, and the sarnobat should be Marathas of good families. They
should be appointed after someone of the royal personal staff had agreed to stand surety [for
them]. A Brahman known to the king’s personal staff should be appointed sabnis and a Prabhu,
karkhanis. In this manner each officer retained should be dissimilar [in caste] to the others. The
fort was not to be left in the hands of the havaldar alone. No single officer could surrender the
fort to any rebel or miscreant.’27
Dividing up work among people of different castes was presumably to
prevent people of one caste getting together to carry out subversive
activities or join hands with the enemy and hand over a fort. The idea of
putting three officials in charge was, similarly, to preclude treachery and
betrayal. It didn’t always work. On occasions officials faced charges of
misappropriation of funds,28 and in a previous chapter we saw how Shivaji
had written a letter to his officials in 1663 about the fort of Sinhagad having
been compromised by its officials, making it necessary for loyalist forces to
march there and take possession.
For Shivaji, light infantry and light cavalry were hugely critical in view of
the hilly nature of his terrain which necessitated swift movement, and he
laid down the chain of command for both. In the cavalry, the bargirs or
those ‘equipped with horse and arms by the state’ would form the heart of a
unit, while shiledars those who brought their own horse and sometimes a
body of troops equipped at their own expense would be ‘under the
jurisdiction of the paga [unit]’ and would therefore not be at liberty to turn
into self-styled dons.29 Shiledars were known to be unwieldy and for their
penchant to dictate terms, and their body of troopers often did the exact
opposite of what the ruler commanded. Shivaji did not want the rules he
was laying down breached and prima donna shiledars calling the shots. And
while both infantry and cavalry heads were important, as was the naval in-
charge, the cavalry chief was overall head of the military forces, reporting
to Shivaji.
Shivaji recruited Muslims in his army along with Hindus, just as he had
two senior Muslim officials, Daulat Khan and Darya Sarang, in his navy.
His first infantry chief in fact was Noor Beg, a Muslim, about whom no
other information is available except his name and the fact that after the
conquest of Jaawali, he was succeeded by a Maratha, Yesaji Kank.30
According to one Maratha document, a group of 700 Pathans who offered
to join Shivaji’s army were recruited by him in the face of opposition from
most of his officials, with the notable exception of his veteran colleague
Gomaji Naik Pansambal, who backed the decision on merit.31
Shivaji had, according to Sabhasad, put together a code of conduct for his
army. Since the army spent eight months out on expeditions, it was
permitted to levy contributions from outside territories for subsistence and
maintenance; in that era, armies of states depended almost entirely on the
resources of the place they camped in. Shivaji’s code stated explicitly that
‘in enemy territories, women and children should not be captured’, ‘cows
not taken’ and ‘Brahmans not molested’;32 the cow was a holy animal for
Hindus, and Brahmins had a place of privilege in the deeply entrenched
caste order. Further, Shivaji said ‘there should be no women, female slaves
or dancing girls in the army’, ‘he who would keep them should be
beheaded’, and ‘no one should commit adultery’.33 One of Shivaji’s harshest
critics was the official Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan; he once described
the Maratha as a ‘hell-dog’.34 Khafi Khan wrote that ‘fortune so favoured’
the ‘treacherous, worthless’ Shivaji that ‘his forces increased, and he grew
more powerful every day’. He had to concede this, however:
But he [Shivaji] made it a rule that wherever his followers went plundering, they should do no
harm to the mosques, the Book of God, or the women of anyone. Whenever a copy of the sacred
Koran came into his hands, he treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Musulman
followers. Whenever the women of any Hindu or Muhammadan were taken prisoners by his men,
he watched over them until their relations came with a suitable ransom to buy their liberty
Shivaji had always striven to maintain the honour of the people in his territories. He persevered in
a course of rebellion, in plundering caravans, and troubling mankind, but he entirely abstained
from other disgraceful acts, and was careful to maintain the honour of women and children of
Muhammadans when they fell into his hands. His injunctions upon this point were very strict, and
anyone who disobeyed them received punishment.35
If Shivaji’s army wanted anything, he directed it was to be ‘obtained by
peaceful purchase’. Armies of the period were known to enter villages at
will and take grain or whatever else they laid their eyes on the strength of
their sword. While this was deemed an acceptable tactical move in that age
and carried out by just about everyone in enemy territory, if it happened
inside a state’s home territory, there was nothing the affected peasants or
villagers could do, no one they could appeal to, and no one they could turn
to for help. Shivaji made serious efforts to change this pattern of behaviour.
During his journey through Golconda in the 1670s, Shivaji warned his
soldiers not to create trouble for ordinary people and made an example of a
few offenders.36 In 1673, he wrote a noteworthy letter to his regiment
stationed at Chiplun in his own territory, warning it not to harass people in
the neighbourhood or forcibly take provisions from them.37 Shivaji knew
his troops had exhausted most of their supplies, and though provisions had
been sent from elsewhere, including for the horses, he thought it likely they
would ‘feed recklessly’ and there would be nothing left at ‘the height of the
rainy season’. ‘You will have to starve, and the horses will begin to die.
That will mean you will have killed the horses,’ he wrote. Then, Shivaji
noted:
you will begin to trouble the country Some will take the grain of the cultivators, some bread,
some grass, some vegetables and things. When you begin to behave like that, the poor peasants …
holding on to their homes and somehow making a living will begin to run away. Many of them
will begin starving to death. They will think you are worse than the Mughals who overrun the
countryside! So much agony there will be, and all the curses of the peasants and horses will
descend on you.38
He was, therefore, laying out his expectations of his soldiers:
Whether you are a Sipahi or a pavkhalak [foot soldier], keep your conduct right. Some of you
may be staying along the paga [military unit] or in different villages in the muluk [land]. Don’t
give the rayats [peasants] the slightest trouble you have no business straying out of your
camping places. Money has been given to you from the government treasury. Whatever any
soldier may want, grain or vegetable or fodder for animals, duly buy it if it comes around to be
sold or go to the bazaar and buy it duly there. Don’t force anybody. Don’t tyrannize anybody.
Provisions assigned to government stables must last through the rainy season. The karkuns
[clerks] will give rations of grains with this in mind: take only what is needed, so you don’t have
to go without food; there will be something to eat every day, and the horses will gradually gain
strength. Don’t lose your temper with the karkun for no reason or say ‘give me this’ and ‘give me
that’, and don’t violently enter the store-room and seize things from it.39
He highlighted how small things could lead to big disasters.
The men attached to the stables are probably already living and will live in single stacks. Some of
them will make fires, some will make their chulhas and cook in all sorts of unsuitable places;
some will take live coals to light their pipes with, without thinking of whether there is any grass
lying about, or whether there is a breeze. And suddenly there will be an accident. When one
haystack catches fire, all the others will catch it and get burnt down. If some spark falls from
somewhere on a few blades of grass, all the grass will be ablaze. The horses would die of hunger
and the cavalry would be ruined. Then even if the heads of some peasants are cut off or
punishment dealt to the karkuns, hay could not be procured and not a single haystack built So
be careful and let the officers go around always and see that there is no cooking or lighting of
fires [at unsuitable places] or that a lamp is not kept burning at night, so that a mouse can come
and take a burning wick with it. Let there be no accident from fire. See that the grass, the rooms,
are safe. Then the horses will survive the rainy season. If disaster strikes, it will not be necessary
to tie the horses or feed them; the establishment itself would have been extinguished! And you
won’t have any worries left! That is why I have written to you in so much detail. All the officers –
jumledars, havaldars and karkuns – should hear this letter in all its details and be alert. I will keep
myself informed regularly, every day, and those who commit wrongs will be punished.40
The Bijapur army had become infamous during Shivaji’s times for its lack
of discipline, and the march of Mughal armies was often marred by
indolence, indulgence and excesses. In such a situation Shivaji was seeking
to create order and discipline in his military, something which was almost
always a work in progress. In September 1671, he received information that
one of his soldiers had attacked the sabnis of his regiment with a sword; the
following year, Shivaji pulled up one of his top officials because the troops
had given trouble to pilgrims of the fair at Chaphal, where lived the saint
Ramdas, revered by Shivaji and by people across the state for his devotion
to Lord Ram.41 It was particularly embarrassing for the Maratha state that
such things were happening in the land of a towering religious authority and
figure like Ramdas.
Yet John Fryer, a surgeon with the British East India Company who
travelled across the Deccan and who saw the Marathas as nothing but a
source of trouble for him and his masters, made an interesting comparison
between Shivaji’s army and that of Bijapur. He recorded that:
the hilly people are of a rougher temper, more hardy and less addicted to the soft vanities of
musick, cloathing, pomp or stateliness Seva Gi’s men [are] thereby fitter for any martial
exploit, having been accustomed to fare hard, journey fast, and take little pleasure. But the other
will miss of a booty rather than a dinner; must mount in state and have their arms carried before
them, and their women not far behind them, with the masters of mirth and jollity; will rather
expect than pursue a foe; but then they stand it out better; for Seva Gi’s men care not much for a
pitched field, though they are good at surprising and ransacking; yet they are both of stirring
spirits.42
Shivaji had undoubtedly wanted the phase from 1667 to 1669 to be a very
quiet one, where he could regain his strength and carry out reforms. Yet, it
was bang in the middle of this decidedly quiescent period that he launched
his first and, as it turned out, only attack on the soil of Goa against the
Portuguese. Why did he target Goan territory when he disturbed neither the
Adil Shahi nor the Mughals at this time? Was there any provocation?
There had actually been a build-up of tensions between Shivaji and the
Portuguese. Though the decline of Portugal as a global power was well
under way with its repeated conflicts with the Dutch in the seventeenth
century, the Portuguese were still the predominant power on India’s west
coast. They ruled not only Goa but Daman, Diu, Bassein (Vasai, near
Bombay) and Chaul (near Alibaug); and Bombay too had belonged to them,
until they gave it away to the British in 1662. It was precisely on this stretch
that Shivaji had started building his navy from the late 1650s. His first sea
forays were in Kalyan, Bhiwandi and Panvel, and part of his fleet was being
built in upper Chaul that part of the northern Konkan, just a little north
and a little south of Bombay, where the Portuguese called the shots, and
where they did not want a rival to come up. Initially they did not respond to
Shivaji in a hostile manner: they had always professed to be neutral in their
dealings with all the powers on the land, be it the Adil Shahi or the
Mughals, and they watched Shivaji’s early activities silently but intently.
Soon, they realized that Shivaji wanted Janjira, a fort more than 70
kilometres south of Bombay that was held by the Siddis. The fort was of
strategic significance: anyone who wanted to control the coastal corridor
needed to have it in order to move their fleet easily between north and south
Konkan. The hold of the Siddis in the areas adjoining Janjira too was
strong, so naturally, Shivaji wished to neutralize them.
From the beginning of Shivaji’s attempted assaults on Janjira in the late
1650s, the Portuguese tacitly assisted the Siddis. They were convinced that
the Siddis had no desire to go beyond their small sphere of control; Shivaji,
on the other hand, was eyeing far bigger things and could emerge as a direct
competitor. As attack after Maratha attack on Janjira was resisted by the
Siddis, Shivaji realized that the Siddis were doubtlessly doughty fighters,
but the only reason they could withstand repeated onslaughts was the active
assistance offered to them by the Portuguese in terms of vessels, arms and
ammunition.
Subsequently, Shivaji took, one by one, various towns to the north of Goa
held by local satraps who were vassals of Bijapur. The geographical
boundaries of Goa were then very different from the present ones: areas
such as Ponda, Perne, Bhatagram (Bicholim) and Sattari (Sanquelim) were
not inside Goa then, but to its north. And the local desais were the rulers
there. By the end of 1664 Shivaji had captured most of these areas, forcing
the desais to flee. Just before he left for Agra in 1666, Shivaji had also
besieged the Ponda fort, but the Adil Shahi general Rustam-i-Zaman had
come down the ghats, lifted the siege and also brought the areas previously
occupied by Shivaji under the Adil Shahi banner.43 (Shivaji believed that the
Bijapur territory of southern Konkan was his by agreement with Bijapur,
but Bijapur had now reneged on this by repossessing these areas.) Shivaji
knew that Ponda had been able to hold out until Rustam-i-Zaman’s arrival
only because the Portuguese had secretly supplied ammunition to it. On his
return from Agra, Shivaji regained all of the south Konkan territory of the
Adil Shah, except Ponda and a few other smaller spots (though the
Portuguese received information that he had probably captured some
villages around Ponda fort).44
The Portuguese did not want Shivaji too close to the borders of Goa, but
there he was. The viceroy of Goa worriedly reported to the king of Portugal
on 20 September 1667 that Shivaji ‘is now our neighbour at Ponda’. But
while highlighting the peril Goa faced, the viceroy also paid Shivaji a huge
compliment in the same letter to the Portuguese king. ‘His [Shivaji’s]
alacrity, valour, alertness and military foresight are of the order of Caesar
and Alexander. He is omnipresent,’ he wrote.45
The immediate provocation for Shivaji to enter Goa now was that the
Portuguese had provided shelter to all the desais and their dalvis or high
officials evicted by him from the areas north of their state. The Portuguese
were also helping these desais to make incursions into their former
territories and create trouble for Shivaji there.
Almost all the desais and dalvis had taken refuge in Bardez inside Goa.
From there, they went back to their old watans, and harassed and attacked
the local population, with Portuguese assistance. Bardez itself was in the
grip of serious religious frenzy. The viceroy, Conde de San Vincente, had
baptized 7,000 Hindus in this part of north Goa and efforts were under way
to convert the remaining 3,000; a Christian priest recorded optimistically
that they would soon ‘adopt the faith’. In September that year, the viceroy
also issued a notification asking all Hindus to leave Bardez within two
months as ‘their presence affected the loyalty of the Christians to their
religion’. The same month, Narba Sawant, nephew of Lakham Sawant, who
had been the desai of Kudal, entered Vengurla with the help of the
Portuguese, perpetrated violence and caused trouble to the Dutch who had
their factory there.
On 22 November 1667, Shivaji began his offensive inside the Portuguese-
ruled territory: he invaded Bardez with 1,000 cavalry and 5,000 infantry.
The Portuguese, having received information that he was on his way,
successfully sheltered the desais whom Shivaji wanted to target. But
villages weren’t spared: a number of them were attacked and hundreds of
people were captured, including women and children, who were usually left
alone by Shivaji’s soldiers; these were clear violations of Shivaji’s code of
conduct. A report by local Franciscan padres stated that Shivaji headed
straight to Colvale, where one of the desais, Keshav Naik, was supposed to
be hiding. The rector of Colvale who emerged from the church to inquire
about the noise outside was ‘cut down’, and so was another padre, who
suffered eighteen wounds. Some other Christians too were killed.46
The viceroy ordered troops and ships from outside Bardez for support, and
the villages of the local Ranes along the borders were used by the
Portuguese as bases against the Marathas. The fighting went on for two
days, but negotiations for peace began on the third day itself, with both
sides saying they desired peace. Negotiations were speedy as Shivaji was
close by, at Bicholim, and a treaty of friendship was concluded on 5
December 1667. The viceroy informed his bosses in Portugal that ‘Shivaji
duly returned all the plunder and women and children that his troops had
seized’,47 and Shivaji, in return, extracted from the Portuguese the promise
that they would not provide refuge to the desais inside their territory. All
the desais were expelled from Goa the following year.
Did Shivaji’s invasion have anything to do with the driving away of
Hindus by Goa’s viceroy? No. Shivaji was clear he was upset with the
Portuguese for having harboured the desais. Not just the final treaty, but
even the ‘note of instructions’ the Portuguese envoy carried from the
viceroy to Shivaji during negotiations, which spoke of the points to be
discussed with the Maratha leader, made no mention of the issue of
religious persecution.48 That means it never figured in the talks. A
pragmatic man, Shivaji even allowed the Portuguese to open a factory at
Dabhol in 1668.49 And the treaty signed by him with the Portuguese stated
that Goa’s rulers would not provide shelter to the desais working against
Shivaji. (Another treaty was signed between the two in 1670 to facilitate
trade between Shivaji’s territories and Goa, though tensions between them
remained unresolved until Shivaji’s death, with the Marathas accusing the
Portuguese of continuing to clandestinely help their enemies whenever they
could.)
However, a theory emerged and gained currency that there was a religious
angle to Shivaji’s actions in Goa, thanks to an Englishman’s letter of 30
November 1667 that cited the padres’ apparent refusal to convert to
Hinduism as the reason for their killings. That was simply not true. All the
records of the Portuguese, the Marathas and the Dutch are clear about
this. P.S. Pissurlencar, who dug up the records, concluded correctly that the
Marathas’ attack on the padres wasn’t premeditated, and that they were
killed as they were found out of doors and seen as hostile elements who
might mount an attack. Apart from the fact that Shivaji didn’t attack people
of faith whatever their religion or denomination, it’s important to note, as
Pissurlencar stated, that ‘padres often participated in battles as armed
soldiers and therefore met with resistance from the enemy. That they were
not non-violent preachers must not be lost sight of.’50 The Portuguese also
recorded that the Marathas thought of Portuguese priests as ‘excellent
soldiers’.51
Having said that, Shivaji was far from indifferent to the prejudicial
policies of the Portuguese with regard to Hindus. He demonstrated an
interest in the matter by restoring and repairing the temple of
Saptakoteshwara in Narve, Bicholim, which had been demolished first by
the Bahmani rulers and then by the Portuguese. The Kadamba dynasty that
ruled Goa worshipped Lord Shiva as Saptakoteshwara, their family deity. In
the twelfth century the Kadambas built a massive stone temple for the deity
in Narve on the island of Diwadi. Destroyed by Muslim rulers in the
fourteenth century, the temple was reconstructed by Madhava, a minister of
the Vijayanagara state. A Portuguese priest, Minguel Vaz, ordered it to be
razed again in 1540; within eight years, the Hindus reconstructed it in a
small way but a little away, beyond Diwadi. Shivaji carried out repairs to
the Saptakoteshwara temple and rebuilt it in November 1668 at the same
spot beyond Diwadi.52
This was, significantly, during a period when Aurangzeb was targeting
Hindu shrines. He had demolished the famed Somnath temple in Gujarat
and the temple of Lord Vishwanath at Kashi,53 perhaps the most prestigious
of the twelve jyotirlingas, and replaced it with a mosque known today as
the Gyanvapi mosque. Mathura, considered the birthplace of Lord Krishna,
was a particularly sore spot in Aurangzeb’s eyes. In January 1670, he
directed that the Krishna temple there be razed, and his chronicler recorded
that ‘in a short time … the destruction of this strong foundation of infidelity
was accomplished, and on its site a lofty mosque was built’.54 Places of
worship in Ujjain, where another of the jyotirlingas stood, were similarly
targeted, as were Hindu religious sites in Bihar, Bengal and Orissa.55
Shivaji had been careful not to create a rupture with the Mughals as he
went about restabilizing his provinces, refurbishing forts, setting up the
patterns of his administration and, in the case of the Saptakoteshwara
temple, reconsecrating a Hindu place of worship. He had also sent a
military unit led by Prataprao Gujar and Niraji Raoji to Aurangabad to
report to Prince Muazzam and had taken up the jagir offered in his son
Sambhaji’s name in Warhad in northern Maharashtra.56 The Maratha force
of 5,000 spent most of its time split into two, half of it encamped in
Aurangabad with Muazzam’s men and the other half guarding Sambhaji’s
jagir.57 Shivaji’s relations with Muazzam too were reported to be relatively
peaceful and sound, and there was hardly a word about discord between
them.
But the truce was far too unnatural to last very long.
Quoted in Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 90–91.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Shivaji’s letter to Aurangzeb of 22 April 1667 quoted in Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 126–127;
Mehendale (English), 349.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 179.
The deshmukhi rights allowed him to collect revenue on behalf of the government.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 179–181; Mehendale (English), 349.
Mehendale (English), 351.
Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 174.
Ibid., 177–178.
Sabhasad, 38.
Ibid.
Mehendale (English), 367.
Ibid., 375–376.
Sabhasad, 37.
Mehendale (English), 367.
Sabhasad, 37.
Letter of 5 September 1676 to subhedar Ramaji Anant of Prabhavali district, quoted in Mehendale
(English), 373–374.
Surendra Nath Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas (L.G. Publishers, [1925] 2021), 52.
Shivaji’s letter to the subhedar of Junnar division, quoted in Mehendale (English), 376.
Correspondence between Shivaji and Nilopant Sondev, quoted in Mehendale (English), 362.
Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 77.
Sabhasad, 29; Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 78–82.
Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 79.
Ibid., 79–80.
Ibid., 85.
Sabhasad, 29–30.
When Shivaji had gone to Jai Singh’s camp, there was no havaldar at Rajgad, and the charge of the
fort was temporarily with Keso Narayan, the sabnis, who allegedly misappropriated a large sum
from public funds. Case cited in Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 82.
Ibid., 85–86.
Mehendale (English), 386.
Chitnis Chronicle, quoted in Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 86–87.
Sabhasad, 82.
Ibid.
Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, 58.
Ibid., 48–49, 93.
Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 90–91.
I have, in part, relied on the translations of R.P. Patwardhan, H.G. Rawlinson and Surendra Nath Sen
for this letter, but have changed many of their archaic wordings and constructions, by looking very
closely at the Marathi original, to make the language contemporary and, at the same time, absolutely
accurate. The original letter is Document No. 28 in Vol. 8 of V.K. Rajwade’s Marathyanchya
Itahasachi Sadhane [Sources and Documents of Maratha History]. Rajwade’s works are available
online on www.samagrarajwade.com, and the link to the letter from Vol. 8, should the reader want to
check, is: https://samagrarajwade.com/index.php/marathyanchya-itihasachi-sadhane-khand-
1/marathyanchya-itihasachi-sadhane-khand-8?start=81. Patwardhan and Rawlinson’s translation of
the letter is in their Source Book of Maratha History, 152–154, and Sen’s translation is in
Administrative System of the Marathas, 91–92.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 91.
Rawlinson and Patwardhan, Source Book of Maratha History, 302; Sen, Administrative System of
the Marathas, 92.
The areas brought by Shivaji under his control, which were taken by the Adil Shah, were Kudal,
Pernem, Bhatagram (Bicholim) and Sattari (Sanquelim).
P.S. Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations, translated by T.V. Parvate (Maharashtra State
Board for Literature and Culture, 1983).
Letter of Goa’s viceroy, Vice-Rei Conde de San Vincente, to the king of Portugal, ibid., 45–46.
Ibid., 51–52.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 51–52.
Ibid.
V.T. Gune, ed., Gazetteer of the Union Territory: Goa, Daman and Diu District Gazetteer, Part I
(Goa) (Panaji: Government Printing Press, 1979), 64; Pissurlencar, Portuguese–Mahratta Relations,
56.
Ibid., 55.
Saqi Mustad Khan, Maasir-i-Alamgiri, 60.
Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 3, 301, 304.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 172–173.
B.M. Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Uttarardha [Part 2] (Marathi) (Purandare Prakashan, 2018
edition), 231–233.
OceanofPDF.com
12
Shivaji Strikes Back
Shivaji’s truce with Aurangzeb and the Mughals had always been a shaky
one. It had been a trial, as severe as many of the other trials he had faced.
But towards the end of 1669, Shivaji was confident he had seen the ordeal
through; with three full years of rebuilding starting from 1667 behind him,
he was ready to abandon all pretences and fling himself into the business of
confronting Aurangzeb all over again.
As it happened, Aurangzeb himself provided reason for Shivaji to throw
off the garb of loyalty. Aurangzeb distrusted his son Muazzam’s motives in
the Deccan and had certainly not forgiven Shivaji for what he had done in
Agra. He heard that his son’s relations with Shivaji were good and were in
fact improving by the day, and suspicion quickly rose in his mind that
Muazzam might be preparing himself for a succession war in alliance with
the Marathas.
Unable to hold himself back any longer, Aurangzeb directed the
confiscation of portions of the jagir granted to Sambhaji ostensibly for
recovery of the one lakh rupees he had advanced to Shivaji for his travel to
Agra. At the same time, according to Sabhasad, the Mughal emperor
hatched a plan to arrest Shivaji’s senior officials at Aurangabad who, like
Shivaji himself, were getting on rather too well with Muazzam.1
Along with these two aggravations, there was a third one: Aurangzeb
wanted Shivaji to back off from the boundaries of Janjira. Shivaji’s very
first offensive in 1669, after having regained much of his strength, was
aimed at the long-desired capture of Janjira, the sea fort that had eluded him
for so long, and this time he came extremely close to winning it. Despite the
‘572 pieces of ordnance’2 the Siddis had with them, Shivaji took their fort,
Danda-Rajpuri, opposite Janjira and drove the chief official, Siddi Fateh
Khan, to first seek the help of the Portuguese and the British, which they
secretly offered, and then of the Mughals. Even so, the Marathas looked
well placed to take Janjira, and Fateh Khan was on the verge of
surrendering when three of his generals rose in revolt and, motivated by
Siddi pride, deposed him and kept up the resistance. Bijapur, which
nominally ruled over the Siddis, could not help, so the three Siddi generals
approached the Mughals, as Fateh Khan too had earlier, and a Mughal
farman was issued ordering Shivaji to instantly withdraw.
Shivaji was thoroughly annoyed: his argument was that, on the one hand,
the Mughal–Maratha treaty signed by Aurangzeb had directed him to
capture as much Bijapur territory as he could, and on the other, the emperor
was directly and blatantly blocking his moves.
Was Shivaji also repelled by Aurangzeb’s growing religious fanaticism,
apart from his other provocations? There is no direct statement from him at
this precarious moment, yet two contemporary documents specifically refer
to this. One is a letter by a British official Henry Gary, who reported to
Surat from Bombay that ‘the arch rebel Sevagee is again engaged in arms
against Orangsha [Aurang-shah or Aurangzeb] who, out of a blind zeale for
reformation, hath demolished many of the Gentue [Hindu] temples and
forceth many to turne Musslemins’.3 The other is the Jedhe family
chronicle, which states that ‘from 17 August to September 1669 Aurangzeb
harassed Benaras and destroyed temples. In the month between 14
December [1669] and 11 January 1670, the peace between the Mughals and
Shivaji came to an end. Prataprao and Anandrao, who with their contingents
were with the Prince [Muazzam] at Aurangabad, returned to Rajgad.’4
Evidently, for a variety of reasons, Shivaji decided he had had enough.
The first place he chose to target was the one that stared him in the face.
From the top of Rajgad, where he and his mother were then staying, Shivaji
could see in the distance the impressive fort of Kondhana or Sinhagad. It
was among the earliest forts he had taken, but he had had to give it up in the
wake of his fathers arrest in 1648. In subsequent years it had come back to
him and had been a part of his dominions for over a decade until it was
given away again in 1666, as part of the Treaty of Purandar. In places the
fort was so steep the climb was almost vertical, and while all its heights
were hard to ascend, those at the western end were considered impassable.
One of Shivaji’s Mavale aides, Tanaji Malusare, offered to lead the
onslaught. Tanaji hailed from the village of Umratha to the south-east of
Mahad in the Konkan and was in charge of a Maratha infantry force of
1,000.5 We don’t know his exact age at the time of the battle of Kondhana,
but he had struck up a close friendship with Shivaji right from their
childhood and was of the same generation. Shivaji was thirty-nine in 1669,
so Tanaji would be around the same age, give and take perhaps a couple of
years. Known to be extremely tough, spirited and uncompromising as a
soldier, Tanaji had figured prominently in various military campaigns, most
notably against Afzal Khan’s army and during Shivaji’s foray into southern
Konkan. And he always had his younger brother Suryaji by his side,
helping him in all his endeavours.
The rival Tanaji was set to face was of a similarly solid martial reputation.
Udaibhan Rathod, a thirty-eight-year-old Rajput from Jodhpur, was the
highly competent leader of the Mughal garrison at Kondhana.6 Most of his
men there were fellow Rajputs. There were 1,200 of them versus Tanaji’s
500 Marathas.7 But the Maratha method was reliant not on numbers or on
prolonged sieges, but on surprise and skill. Surprise included attacking in
the dead of night, and that was Tanaji’s plan too.
At around midnight on 4 February 1670, Tanaji reached the bottom of the
fort with his men and asked two ‘good and fearless’ Mavale to begin their
climb.8 With consummate skill they went up the precipice and reached the
ramparts, where they fixed a rope ladder for Tanaji and the others to ascend.
Around 300 Mavale thus crept up slowly and stealthily, the wind gently
whistling in their ears and the noises made by bats and other creatures
breaking the dead silence of a dark night. The Rajputs were soon alerted to
the presence of the enemy. Jadunath Sarkar has written that the Rajputs atop
the fort were ‘stupefied with opium’,9 a dubious claim that undoubtedly
helped a Bollywood filmmaker (who made an otherwise very watchable
film on Tanaji) come up with a scene of delirious revelry showing the
garrison as negligent and foolish. Udaibhan Rathod and his men were, in
truth, agile and alert, and as soon as they realized that the Marathas had
already climbed up quietly, the ‘gunners, archers and expert swordsmen’
picked up their weapons, lit their torches and chandrajyotis (candles filled
with powders), and rushed to repel the attackers. But the surprise had
indeed worked, and as blade clashed against blade, and archers and lancers
took aim, a massive confrontation broke out, the Marathas demonstrating a
fierce spirit and filling the air with cries of ‘Har Har Mahadev’.
Sometime in the midst of the fight the rival commanders came face to
face, raining blows on each other and also defending themselves valiantly
with their shields. At one point the shield that Tanaji held in his hand broke,
and a second shield didn’t arrive in time. Without a break he fought on,
‘making a shield of his left hand’ and pluckily and dauntlessly taking
Udaibhan’s blows on it. Soon the two, ‘fired with anger and fighting
furiously, struck each other fatal blows with their swords and fell to the
ground. Tanaji’s brother Suryaji immediately stepped up and rallied all the
Marathas, ensuring their assault did not flag at that critical moment. All the
1,200 defenders ended up dead, many of them ‘leaping down the cliffin
the heat of the unanticipated clash.
The Marathas took control of the fort, and in a signal to their supreme
leader who had stayed up all night to track the attack, they set fire to the
stacks in the stables. Shivaji, according to Sabhasad, saw the blazing flames
and cried out, ‘The fort has been captured! Victory has been achieved!’
Early the next morning, an informer told Shivaji what had happened.
Crushed to hear of Tanaji’s death, Shivaji said, ‘One fort has been taken, but
another fort [Tanaji] is gone.’ Shivaji praised Suryaji Malusare as well for
his courage and conferred Tanaji’s suba (province) on him; all the soldiers
who participated in the epic clash were given ‘gold bracelets’ and ‘gold-
embroidered clothes’.
Buoyed by their triumph at Kondhana, the Marathas set out to recapture
their other lost forts they had given up twenty-three of thirty-five forts to
the Mughals and so swift and smooth was their success that within a
matter of only four months, almost all of the twenty-three citadels they had
given up were back in Shivaji’s possession. Their restored chutzpah was
exemplified by the conquest of the prestigious Purandar in March 1670,
during which the Marathas took the Mughal qiledar (fort commander)
Raziuddin captive. Their dominance was similarly overwhelming in
Nanded, whose faujdar (military unit chief) Fateh Jung Khan fled in such
fright that the irascible Aurangzeb felt compelled to dispossess him of the
word ‘Jung’ in his title. Ludi Khan, the governor of Konkan, was routed
twice and forced to leave the coastal areas, and the Mughal commander in
Kalyan–Bhiwandi, Uzbek Khan, was attacked and killed by Shivaji. The
qiledar of Mahuli near Thane, Manohardas Gaud, fought hard and well, but
here too, the Marathas had the upper hand throughout, forcing a hapless
Gaud to send in his resignation to Muazzam at Aurangabad because he
knew he could not defend it any longer. The commander who replaced him,
Allahvardi Khan, was killed by the Marathas and the fort taken.10 The
Mughal governor of Khandesh,11 Daud Khan, was summoned by Aurangzeb
to deal with the Marathas, as was Diler Khan, who was then in Gond
country and who had given the Marathas a tough time at Purandar only four
years earlier. Their arrival, however, failed to stem the tide. ‘A number of
Mughal officers arrived in Aurangabad in a very miserable condition,’
wrote the historian Bhimsen Saxena who was then working with the
Mughals in the Deccan.12
Apart from reclaiming forts, Maratha forces also plundered places near
Ahmadnagar, Junnar and Parenda, and in particular carried out major raids
in Warhad, where Sambhaji had earlier been granted a jagir by Aurangzeb
and from which parts had been seized to purportedly recover the advance
given for Shivaji’s Agra visit. A Mughal newsletter stated 20,000 Marathas
had arrived in the region and taken 20 lakh rupees.13 The British at Bombay
and Surat noted that Shivaji’s ‘motions have ever been so quick that his
designs were rarely yet anticipated’ and that Shivaji ‘now marches not
before as a thief but in gross with an army of 30,000 men, conquering as he
goes, and is not disturbed though the [Mughal] Prince lies near him’.14
The recapture of twenty-three lost forts in just four months was an almost
impossible feat. Mere familiarity with the terrain could not account for such
astonishing success. How was it all done? Barring the case of Sinhagad,
there are no surviving records which give any details of how the other forts
were won, one after the other, in an avalanche of attacks. But if the glimpse
provided by the charged atmosphere and inspired action at Sinhagad is any
indication, Shivaji had chalked out an elaborate strategy and assigned
specific tasks to specific teams after mapping out all the details of the near-
simultaneous push and thrust to be made. All of it must have been backed
up by vows, by a sense of opportunity, and by the inspiration provided by
Tanaji and his spirited men for their fellow Marathas at the very beginning
of the bold repossession initiative.
What is pretty certain is that most of the attacks on the forts were mounted
by the Marathas in the night, incorporating their famous element of
surprise. And we know thanks to British records among the very few
available records which throw some light on the regaining of forts, apart
from Sabhasad’s details about the Sinhagad mission that the Maratha
action did not cease even during the monsoon. This undoubtedly was a
standout factor, for all armies, especially those in the mountains, hills and
mountain passes and also those along the coastline corridors, were known
to rest during the rains. Shivaji had intelligently made an exception. The
British officials in Bombay wrote to Surat, ‘Shivaji is not so slothful as the
Mughal’s forces, for he not only makes hay while the sun shines, but then
when it is obscured by violent rains also.’ Since the Mughal army had
‘withdrawn forces up the hill [Sahyadris] for a quiet wintering, his have not
been idle, but have recovered for him Lohgad, Kohoj and very lately
made an assault again upon Mahuli’.15
While the Maratha forces had definitely benefited from a three-year break
from conflict and by Shivaji’s efforts to put his house in order, and been re-
energized by his re-entry into planned aggression, the Mughal response was
in part hamstrung by internal conflict. Prince Muazzam and his top general
Diler Khan didn’t see eye to eye. Diler Khan was deeply suspicious of
Muazzam, and believed the prince was planning to throw him into prison
and get him killed. He was also the chief purveyor of ‘reports’ to the
emperor that Muazzam was hand in glove with Shivaji and was waiting for
an opportunity to usurp Aurangzeb’s throne. Muazzam, on the other hand,
accused Diler Khan of not attending his court Diler Khan had indeed
stayed away from it for fear of being killed and wrote to his father
demanding action against the insubordinate general. Aurangzeb sent an
official to the Deccan to probe charges made by both sides. Meanwhile,
Diler Khan, finding his position increasingly untenable in the south-western
parts, fled in the direction of Ujjain and was chased in September 1670 by
Muazzam and Muazzam’s aide Jaswant Singh before they were ordered by
the emperor to return to Aurangabad. The Gujarat governor Bahadur Khan
took this opportunity to avail of the services of the able Diler Khan and
asked Aurangzeb if he would move him to Kathiawar, which the latter
promptly did.16
If Aurangzeb had hoped that dust would settle on these internal
disturbances, and the status quo would prevail, he was in for a rude
surprise. On 3 October 1670, Shivaji entered Surat with a force of around
15,000 cavalry and infantry, and sacked the trading town once again, for
two consecutive days. The British had anticipated such an offensive and had
in the previous month itself moved all their goods to Swally, but little else
had changed despite the walls finally having come up around the town after
Shivaji’s first sack six years earlier, in 1664. The local governor had with
him a pitiful force of 300, and just as they had the first time, most Mughal
officials and defenders fled the city the day before the Marathas arrived.
The Hindu and Muslim traders ran away to the fort, as they had in 1664,
and the Marathas had a run of the place except, as on the previous occasion
as well, the factories of the English, Dutch and the French, where either
resistance was offered or bribes paid. The British openly bad-mouthed the
French factory officials, complaining that they had ‘made a private peace
for themselves, on what terms we cannot learn, and so never shot off a
gunn, though at first, being strong in menn, they vapoured as if they would
have fought the whole army themselves’.17
The others who put up a fight were those at the serai of the Persian and
Turkish merchants and at the Tartar serai close to the French factory. Inside
the Tartar serai was the former king of Kashghar, and the men there stood
firm for most of the first day but could go on no more and escaped to the
fort in the night. The English wrote that Shivaji got from the Tartar quarters
‘a vast treasure in gould, silver, (a) rich plate, a gould bed, and other rich
furniture’.18
At noon on 5 October, Shivaji left Surat almost as quickly as he had come
‘to the wonder of all men’, wrote the British, though ‘no enemy was near,
nor the noise of any army to oppose him’. But, they guessed, ‘he had gott
plunder enough’.19 ‘The great houses’ had been ransacked ‘at leisure’ and
‘nearly half the town’ had been ‘destroyed’, and at the time of going away,
the Company’s officials recorded, Shivaji sent a letter to the officers and
chief merchants saying that if they did not pay him a yearly tribute of 12
lakh rupees, he would come back the next year and burn down the
remaining part of Surat.20
As he had done the previous time, Shivaji had in fact written a letter to the
governor and to Surat’s leading merchants before riding down to the city,
demanding for ‘the third’ and ‘last time’ the chauth or quarter part of the
annual revenue:
As your Emperor has forced me to keep an army for the defence of my people and country, that
army must be paid by his subjects. If you do not send me the money speedily, then make ready a
large house for me, for I shall go and sit down there and receive the revenue and custom duties, as
there is none now to stop my passage.21
The official Mughal newsletter estimated the total loot to be worth 66 lakh
rupees.22
Shivaji’s twin accomplishments of speedily winning back the surrendered
forts and pulling off the second sack of Surat were followed by a string of
incredibly efficacious raids across the north and north-east of the Marathi-
speaking regions covering entire stretches of Baglana and Berar. The
Marathas’ belligerent military push which began at the end of 1670 and
frenetic Mughal reactions to it kept armed hostilities continually raging in
the Deccan for three years, up until 1674. There were many instances of
individual exploits by Shivaji. Besieging one fort, Salher, with a 20,000-
strong contingent, Shivaji with his muscled arms, superbly fit despite now
being over forty years old, himself used rope ladders to climb up to the
fort’s ramparts. After the fort commander Fathullah Khan was killed,
Salhers garrison surrendered to Shivaji. All of this resulted in Shivaji’s
name echoing across the land for the scope and scale of his ambitions and
his relentless audacity in challenging an empire that, in the size of its army
and expanse of territory, was at the height of its powers (under Aurangzeb).
An irate Aurangzeb had asked his general Daud Khan, the governor of
Khandesh based in Burhanpur, to intercept Shivaji and his men on their
return home from Surat in October 1670. The Khan moved quickly to catch
the Marathas near Chandor, where the pathway from the northern parts to
Nasik passed through the hills. A particularly violent battle ensued, with the
Marathas on one side and the Bundelas as part of the Mughal army
demonstrating great military skill and mobility. The pounding of the
Mughal artillery forced the Marathas to eventually retreat, but not before
the fighting had gone on until late in the night and the blows inflicted by
them had made the Mughals set up a temporary camp at the spot for
‘burying the dead and tending the wounded’.23
Dissatisfied with the fight his forces were putting up, Aurangzeb
nominated a new commander for the Deccan, Mahabat Khan, formerly
governor of Kabul.24 Soon Aurangzeb was dissatisfied with his progress
too, so Diler Khan and Bahadur Khan, who had moved up north, were sent
back, Bahadur Khan as the new top Deccan general. He and Diler besieged
Salher fort, which Shivaji had climbed to capture. Shivaji’s men, known for
their skill in defending forts in the hills, won this time by attacking the
besiegers from outside. This battle, and another at Mulher at the end of
1671, carried Shivaji confidently into the new year and compensated for the
loss of Pune to Diler Khan at around the same time.
In the middle of 1672, Shivaji captured Jawhar and Ramnagar, which gave
him a boost by opening up the route to Surat. The Portuguese at Daman
used to pay one-fourth of their revenue to Som Shah, the Koli king of
Ramnagar ousted by Shivaji. Now Shivaji demanded it from them, and the
Portuguese agreed to pay chauthai (one-fourth of revenue) though they
never really kept their word.25
More ambitious inroads into Warhad and Telangana in 1673 were blocked
by the Mughals who gave chase to Shivaji’s men, with much loss of life
(400 men) and materials for the Marathas. That year was a much more
mixed one for Shivaji, with the Mughal pushback finally acquiring some
strength. But a further outlet for his revitalized military came in the form of
disorder at the Bijapur court following the death of Ali Adil Shah II. Quick
to seize an opportunity, Shivaji recaptured Panhala and Satara. Panhala’s
recovery brought him a great deal of satisfaction; he had had to surrender it
after Siddi Jauhars siege, and when he had tried to take it back in 1666, he
had been forced to withdraw, resulting in his row with his general Netaji
Palkar. Now Shivaji set up camp at Panhala for a month to ‘direct
operations against Bijapur’ from there.26
The Adil Shahi had meanwhile got a new wazir, Khawas Khan; he was a
firm opponent of Shivaji. He ordered the locally in-charge military general,
Bahlol Khan, to regain Panhala. An Afghan, Bahlol Khan, with his largely
Afghan force of 12,000, defeated the Marathas at Bankapur near Dharwad
while Bijapurs new wazir simultaneously solicited assistance from the
Mughals. Shivaji ordered Prataprao Gujar to attack Bahlol Khan, saying he
was ‘stirring too much’.27 A battle ensued at Umrani near Panhala, where
Bahlol Khan’s unit had camped. The rival sides fought all day, and when
the Bijapuris flagged, Bahlol Khan went up to Shivaji’s sarnobat and
begged for mercy. And Prataprao Gujar, showing magnanimity, promptly
left. The shrewder Shivaji, finding this turn of events inexplicable, asked
his commander, ‘Why have you concluded peace?’28 It turned out that he
had been right to be sceptical. In January and February 1674, Bahlol Khan
was again near Panhala to get it back. Wanting him out, Shivaji wrote a
message to Prataprao Gujar, stating peremptorily, ‘Bahlol Khan is on his
way. Go with the army and rout him. Otherwise don’t show me your face
again.’29
Stung by the rebuke, Prataprao, discovering that Bahlol was at Nesri to
Panhala’s south, rushed recklessly to the spot on 24 February 1674, hoping
to catch him on a pass in the hills. Prataprao, according to some accounts,30
led a party of six men and was killed, as were all the other six. From this
account emerged the legend that only seven brave men had charged against
Bahlol Khan’s 10,000-strong force. What documents attest to is that he
rushed to attack Bahlol Khan with six men in the middle of a larger battle
and was ‘killed by a sword cut’.31 Sabhasad states categorically that ‘a great
battle was fought’ and ‘many fell’ in it, and ‘a river of blood flowed’.32 The
legend, regardless, has assumed a life of its own as an example of Maratha
military valour. The Jnanpith award-winning Marathi poet V.V. Shirwadkar
wrote stirring verses on it; set to music by composer Hridaynath
Mangeshkar in the 1970s, it was immortalized in song by Lata Mangeshkar.
The song, Vedaat Marathe veer daudley saat’, is still played across
Maharashtra at almost all social, cultural and political festivals.
Shivaji was ‘greatly distressed’ at the loss of his number one commander
and said, ‘I have lost a limb. I had written to Prataprao not to show me his
face without securing a victory. He has won great merit and applause by
making the ultimate sacrifice.’33
Still, Maratha raids into Bijapuri lands continued despite the Mughal
general Diler Khan joining hands with Bahlol Khan to ward them off. The
Mughals had foiled a Maratha bid to seize Pune. Their new Deccan
governor Bahadur Khan had defiantly set up camp at Pedgaon on the banks
of the river Bhima near Pune and renamed it after himself as Bahadurgad.
Yet the imperialists were mostly playing catch-up, chasing the Marathas in
Aurangabad, in the Panhala region and, as Shivaji’s men went about
sacking Ramgir, in the Andhras; the Mughals tried and failed to win all but
one or two of the forts captured by the Marathas in Baglana.34 The
Englishmen at Surat wrote in February 1674 that Diler Khan ‘had lately
received a rout by Sevajee and lost 1,000 of his Pattans [Pathans], and
Sevajee about 4 or 500 of his men’.35 Shivaji blocked Mughal passage into
southern Konkan as well. The Mughals stirred the Siddis, who had won
back the fort of Danda-Rajpuri from the Marathas a couple of years before,
asking them to attack Shivaji’s naval fleet, but this did not come to much.
Hobbled by worsening disturbances on the north-west frontiers, the
Mughals were in no position to intensify their efforts against Shivaji. The
revolt of the Afghans had assumed serious proportions. And just as in the
Deccan, Aurangzeb was having to shuffle his top officials there. After two
generals were shunted out in quick succession, Radandaz Khan, known for
ill-treating prisoners in Agra fort, was sent to Peshawar; he was ambushed
and killed by the rebels there in February 1674, just when Diler Khan was
experiencing defeat at Shivaji’s hands in the Deccan. The disasters
compelled Aurangzeb to move himself to Hasan Abdal in the Punjab in
April 1674 to direct operations; a month on, he also called Diler Khan to the
northern frontiers.
Shivaji had begun the post-Agra phase of his career by avoiding direct
military conflict with the Mughals. He had instead bolstered his defences
and repositioned his forces, so that he could strike back at the right moment
to recover possessions. Once the counterstrike began, Shivaji’s campaign
had gone almost perfectly according to plan, save for the truly irrecoverable
loss of close associates like Tanaji and Prataprao, who, he acknowledged,
had made it all possible. Shivaji’s men had dealt significant blows to the
Mughals, getting back everything that had been lost with astonishing
rapidity and thwarting Mughal progress in the Deccan. Aurangzeb and his
generals like Jai Singh had believed that their put-down of Shivaji would
help write him off forever. But after Shivaji had seen himself through a
deliberately quiet phase, he had seen to it that the Mughals lost their grip on
events, and he was now the one defining and shaping the Mughal–Maratha
conflict and most of its outcomes. Alongside the war he was waging with
Aurangzeb, he was reconstructing the political order in the Deccan the way
he wanted; he was making the era of revolt also one of serious reform,
attempting to improve everyday life, resetting various aspects of
administrative and military life. Above all, through patience, planning and
decisive action, he had run rings around Aurangzeb; the reconquering of
forts from Aurangzeb’s troops had been a masterpiece of fleet-footedness.
It was no longer Shivaji but the Mughal empire that was on the back foot
in the Deccan. Shivaji’s domains were now stable enough in both shape and
character for him to declare his independence and sovereignty, and wear the
crown.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 173; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 201.
Letter of 16 October 1669 from British officials at Bombay to Surat, quoted in Mehendale (English),
357.
Letter of 23 January 1670 in English Records on Shivaji, 140.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 202.
Sabhasad, 72; Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Part 2, 356–359.
Ibid.
Sabhasad, 72–73.
For this description of the battle of Kondhana I have relied on Sabhasad, 72–75.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 129.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 204–206; Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 174.
Khandesh is the region comprising Jalgaon and its surrounding areas in northern Maharashtra.
Bhimsen Saxena’s Tarikhe Dilkusha quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 204.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 204–205; Sabhasad, 72; Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 174.
Letter of 29 March 1670 from Bombay to Surat and letter of 30 March 1670 from Surat to the
Company, English Records on Shivaji, 143–144.
Letter of 11 June 1670 from Mumbai to Surat, quoted in Mehendale (English), 418.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 174–175.
Letter of 20 November 1670 from Surat to the Company, English Records on Shivaji, 173–179.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 208.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 136.
Ibid.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 215.
Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Part 2, 307.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 226.
Sabhasad, 107.
Ibid.
Ibid., 109
Purandare, Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, Part 2, 339–343.
Sabhasad, 109.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 222–223, 225–227
Letter from Surat to Bombay, English Records on Shivaji, 321; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 230.
OceanofPDF.com
13
The Crown
One day Shivaji had an unexpected visitor from the enemy camp. He was
busy planning new offensives against the Mughals and Bijapur in the early
1670s from a spot near Satara when his guards informed him that a young
man named Chhatrasal Bundela wanted an audience with him. Intrigued,
Shivaji asked them to show him in.
Chhatrasal, all of twenty years old, was a soldier in the Mughal general
Diler Khan’s camp. He belonged to a clan that had fought hard, as Mughal
soldiers, against Shivaji. Their own homeland, Bundelkhand (now divided
between modern-day Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh), lay close to
Delhi, and they had at first battled the Mughals. Aurangzeb, after ascending
the throne, had come down hard against them, forcing a famous Bundela
warrior, Champat Rai, to end his life along with that of his wife Rani Lal
Kunwar in 1661. Two of Champat Rai’s orphaned sons sought employment
with the Mughals in 1664 and joined Jai Singh’s forces: one was Angad,
and the other, barely fifteen years old then, was Chhatrasal.
The teenaged Chhatrasal had joined Jai Singh on his Deccan mission
against Shivaji, and he and his brother had distinguished themselves at the
siege of Purandar.1 After Jai Singh’s death in 1667, Chhatrasal became a
part of Diler Khan’s contingent, but felt he was undervalued. Stories of
Aurangzeb’s growing bigotry against Hindus, which were by then being
widely circulated, also made him uncomfortable; alongside, Shivaji’s
dazzling brilliance against the Mughals fuelled his desire to meet the
Maratha leader.
Thus, one morning, on the pretext of going hunting, he waded through
forests and crossed two rivers, the Bhima and Krishna, to meet Shivaji;
that’s how he had finally reached Shivaji’s camp. Shivaji welcomed the
young man and, when Chhatrasal had narrated his story, said to him, ‘You
are the crown prince of the Kshatriyas. Jeet apni bhoomi ko, karo desh ko
raj (Go and win your homeland and rule over it).’2
According to Chhatrasal’s court chronicler, Shivaji further told him to
destroy the Mughals. Shivaji said, according to this account:
I have Goddess Bhavani’s blessings, that’s why I am not scared of the Mughals. They have sent
umraos against me, and I have unsheathed my sword against them. Eliminate them the way
Keechaka was killed (by Bhima in the Mahabharata). Go to your country, mobilise your army, and
use your swords to slay the Turkic forces.3
He dissuaded Chhatrasal from joining the Maratha army. ‘If I keep you
here,’ Shivaji said, ‘the credit for your feats will come to me, not to you. So
proceed to your country and destroy the Mughals. Let the stories of your
feats come to my ears.’4 Shivaji gifted Chhatrasal a sword before he left.
The young man, who would live until the age of eighty-one, was quick to
put this advice into action. He built up a military and asserted his
independence in Bundelkhand, though for a brief while he also made peace
with the Mughals.
What the Chhatrasal episode tells us is that Shivaji now had star power
beyond his realm. He had gained great recognition in his homelands of
course, but, importantly, equally in the opposing camp.
Shivaji’s handling of his crisis at the Mughal court in 1666 in particular
had magnified his appeal. Within the city of Agra, voices had risen in praise
of Shivaji immediately after the durbar drama, with one Rajput officer close
to Jai Singh writing to another that though Shivaji’s valour and courage had
been noticed earlier, the people of the city had been especially impressed by
him after his ‘strong replies’ at the emperors court.5 The officer regretted
that no one had properly advised Shivaji against travelling to the imperial
court, a comment that indicated how sympathy for him had grown among
Rajputs, particularly during his imprisonment at Agra. And his subsequent
escape and pushback against Aurangzeb had added immeasurably to his
aura.
As Maratha tensions with the Mughals spiked, a deep appreciation for
Shivaji’s state-building capabilities and his constructive vision came from
closer home, from the revered saint Ramdas, who had his enclave at
Chaphal near Satara. Ramdas was a worshipper of Lord Ram and of Shakti.
He described Shivaji’s growing self-assertiveness against Aurangzeb as
redolent of Maharashtra dharma, referring to a broad set of values and
ethical principles, including spiritual and religious principles. Ramdas
openly declared that Shivaji was singularly responsible for the survival of
Maharashtra dharma.6
This social and cultural approval had a political dimension, given that
politics at the time was always allied to faith. But there was also now,
importantly, another kind of political recognition for Shivaji, which had
more to do with power relations, the interface between states and their
leaders, and diplomacy. Various powers were repositioning themselves vis-
à-vis Shivaji.
We saw in the previous chapter that the Portuguese, earlier not so
amenable to Shivaji’s demands, had agreed to pay chauthai to the Marathas
after Shivaji’s capture of Ramnagar near Daman. Around the same time, the
neighbouring Deccan kingdom of Golconda led by Abul Hasan Qutub
Shah, of which Hyderabad was a part, consented to pay an annual tribute of
one lakh hons to Shivaji because Golconda saw him as a buffer of sorts
between the Mughals and Bijapur.7
The British too had come around from their earlier antagonism towards
Shivaji. They were anxious to conclude a treaty with him as soon as
possible. They had three reasons for doing so. The first was his growing
power, which they could no longer deny (as mentioned, they had recently
admitted he was no longer marching ‘as a thief but in gross with an army of
30,000 men, conquering as he goes’).8 The second was they were still
haggling over compensation from him for their losses at Rajapur during the
Maratha raid of the 1660s. And the third was that a rival power, the Dutch,
had recently offered to help Shivaji capture British-controlled Bombay, an
offer he did not eventually take up but which caused alarm.
The issue of the Rajapur compensation had been complicated by two other
matters: damage caused by Marathas to the British factory at Hubli during a
raid, and the safe passage the British desired for their supplies through
Shivaji’s territories, with their men at Bombay dependent on inland areas
for their requirements. Talks between the British and Shivaji went on
through 1672 and 1673, with Shivaji offering 20,000 rupees as relief for
Rajapur while the British asked for ‘one hundred thousand’.9 In his half-
hour meeting with the British envoy Lieutenant Stephen Ustick in 1672,
Shivaji firmly said he was willing to restore ‘what was entered into his
books’, not more than that.10 The British were not pleased, but they had to
keep up relations with Shivaji because of Bombay’s dependence on his
territory for provisions, timber, firewood, etc.11 Trade had been obstructed
once already, in 1670, when Shivaji had refused to allow the British to cut
and take wood from his lands after they had refused to sell him ‘grenadoes,
mortar pieces’ and other ammunition he wanted against the Siddis.12
The British tried again by sending another envoy, Thomas Niccolls, in
1673. Shivaji treated Niccolls with great courtesy, offering him ‘betel net
and Pawne’, taking him by the hand and asking him to sit on his left, ‘near
one of his side pillowes’.13 But Niccolls achieved nothing, Shivaji telling
him he would ‘send on an answerto the British demands by one of his
own people named Beema [Bhima] Pundett [Pandit]’.14 By the end of
October 1673, however, the British traders were reporting with relief to
their bosses that they were on the verge of concluding an agreement with
Shivaji, which came at the end of the year, with the Marathas agreeing to
pay just 10,000 rupees as damages for the Rajapur raid, the two sides
agreeing to carry out trade, and the Britishers getting access to goods from
Shivaji’s lands.15
These talks and agreements with various powers were all evidence that a
de facto state was being acknowledged by those around Shivaji. But when
would the de facto state become a de jure state? The transformation was
absolutely crucial for all the pacts and agreements to acquire legitimacy and
legal sanctity, and for the people in Shivaji’s lands to feel secure about the
validity of his administration’s orders and regulations if his adversaries
came calling and raised questions. Shivaji was acutely aware that his
opponents, while fearing his military prowess, were disinclined to give him
his due as a statesman, arguing that he was the son of an Adil Shahi sardar
and therefore a mere vassal of Bijapur. The stamp of sovereignty was a
must, and Shivaji decided to confer it on himself at the place that had
become his de facto capital: the fort of Raigad. He planned to get himself
crowned king or, in his idiom, Chhatrapati bearer of the chhatra or royal
umbrella which bestowed kingship and sovereignty. It would be an event
unprecedented in early modern India, since the sprawling Mughal empire
did not allow lesser powers, like the sultanates, for example, to declare
themselves independent in this fashion.
For some years Shivaji had treated Raigad, situated in Mahad, south-west
of Pune, as both his capital and home, though Rajgad still held the status of
official capital. In the 1660s, though, he began carefully fortifying and
developing it as his chief fortress. Raigad stood at 2,800 feet above sea
level, and its greatest attribute was that it provided easy access to the sea.
Believed to have been built during the Satavahana era, Rairi, as the fort was
originally called, had in the mid-fifteenth century been seized from a local
Maratha chief by the Bahmani ruler and had towards the end of the century
come under the control of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate. When the Mughals
and the Adil Shahi divided that state between themselves post-1636, Rairi
went to the Adil Shahi and was for the next couple of decades held by the
Mores of Jaawali on their behalf.16 Shivaji conquered it after defeating the
Mores in 1656, gave it the more formal nomenclature of Raigad, and started
constructing a large number of stone houses, offices and quarters there.
There were two important waterbodies there; to these, Shivaji added a third
reservoir.
And now, Raigad was getting all decked up for the moment of Shivaji’s
crowning glory. It must have been a surreal and supremely special moment
for him and his proud Marathas. Shivaji had been dismissed and attacked
for years as a bandit, a robber, a rover, by his enemies most notably, as a
‘mountain rat’ by Aurangzeb.17 But these pejorative terms had not proved,
for Aurangzeb or for Shivaji’s other adversaries, a helpful cudgel with
which to go after him. Or to put him down. If anything, they had only
stirred him. Spurred him on. Made him plot his moves ever more carefully
and determinedly and bend his neck closer to the shimmering mane of his
stallion to move it at a gallop. He had launched himself on to the big stage
and more than stood his ground when Aurangzeb and his generals had
bared their teeth and attempted a crackdown.
However rude and curt his words for Shivaji, Aurangzeb had wholly
comprehended the powerful emergence of the Maratha rebel when he had
declared to Jai Singh, after Shaista Khan’s disgrace in 1663, that things
were serious enough for him to need to proceed to the Deccan himself.
Aurangzeb’s march to the Deccan became a certainty after Shivaji’s escape
from Agra and especially after his second sack of Surat and recapture of all
of his twenty-three forts surrendered to the Mughals. Shivaji had lost those
forts in just three or four months in 1665, and once he had launched his
moves to get them back early in 1670, he had recovered them in a major
swoop in just as many months. Small had turned big. Rebel had turned
rival. And the Mughal empire itself was now floundering against this
Maratha of ‘acute intelligence’, ‘quick in action, lively in carriage’, ‘with a
clear and fair face’ and ‘dark big eyes so lively that they seemed to dart rays
of fire’.18 Aurangzeb’s worry was that Shivaji could inspire other aspiring
rebels too, and could even be a magnet for them.
But Aurangzeb couldn’t head to the Deccan straightaway. There was too
much trouble in the north, as we have noted, and things had to be quietened
there before his southern campaign could even start. Shivaji knew this
predicament and also the potential of his own rebellion to trigger a bigger
rising which could, his ‘Parmeshwara’ willing, take down the whole
empire. His act of announcing the advent of his own political raj was thus
aimed as much at further checkmating his major rival Aurangzeb as it was
at seeking his personal jurisdictional legality.
Significantly, given Aurangzeb’s increasing championing of what he saw
as the real tenets of Islam and growing reports of his discrimination against
Hindus, who formed the majority of the Mughal empire’s subjects, Shivaji
chose to be consecrated as king according to the well-established Hindu
rituals of kingship. He followed those rules closely and scrupulously for
this special occasion. The prodigious use of ritual in the ceremonies was
intended equally emphatically for Shivaji’s very own people: it would go
down very well with a massively tradition-bound Hindu society and help to
firm up his state’s lawful status in their eyes.
Shivaji called in Gaga Bhatt, a Brahmin priest, all the way from the holy
city of Kashi or Benares to conduct the rites for the coronation ceremony
and to preside over it. Gaga Bhatt’s family was from Paithan in Maharashtra
but had moved to Benares a few centuries earlier; his great-grandfather was
the priest who had reconsecrated the Vishwanath or Vishweshwara temple
after it was rebuilt in the wake of its first demolition. Gaga Bhatt’s real
name in fact was Vishweshwara. The priests of this family were given to
writing religious texts and tracts, and when Gaga Bhatt came to the Deccan
for Shivaji’s coronation, he too wrote a tract on it called the
Shivrajyabhishek Prayog, which provided details of the various rituals to be
carried out.
The coronation ceremony itself was spread over a week starting 30 May
1674, and the muhurat for the enthronement determined by Gaga Bhatt was
just a few minutes short of 5 a.m. on 6 June. When Henry Oxenden, an
official dispatched by the East India Company’s Bombay Council, reached
Pachad, a town at the base of Raigad fort on 19 May, he learnt that Shivaji
had left for Pratapgad. It was for him a special place: it was there he had
built a shrine for Goddess Bhavani. He was now going to bow his head
before her for her blessings and perform some ceremonies. For the goddess
he had ‘carried with him several presents’, among them, Oxenden noted, ‘a
Sombrero of pure gold weighing about 1¼ maunds’.19
Shivaji belonged to the Kshatriya caste, one of the three ‘twice-born
castes’, sandwiched between Brahmins and Vaishyas. Yet Shivaji’s
Kshatriya family, as the Brahmins saw it, had abandoned certain practices
linked to the ‘twice-born’. In particular, they hadn’t bothered with the
sacred thread ceremony, which in any case was largely confined to
Brahmins at that time in the Deccan region. Nor, at the time of his various
marriages, had Shivaji worn a sacred thread, so they could not be regarded
as proper Vedic ceremonies, Gaga Bhatt and the other Brahmin priests felt.
Thus Shivaji had to not just go through a sacred thread ceremony, but had
to be married all over again, before he could be anointed Chhatrapati.20
Sabhasad wrote:
an enquiry being held about the Raja’s family, it was found the Raje was a Shuddha Kshatriya; a
Sisodia family had come from the north to the Deccan, [and] that was the Raja’s ancestral family.
Having previously decided that the sacred thread ceremony should be performed as the Kshatriyas
of the north assumed the sacred thread, the Bhat Gosavi [one of Gaga Bhatt’s associates]
conferred the sacred thread on the Raje.21
The day after Shivaji was invested with the sacred thread (29 May), he
was married to his surviving wives again in keeping with Vedic customs.
On that day, the priests performed the ritual puja for Lord Ganesha as
Ganesha is the Hindu deity ritually propitiated at the time of new
beginnings.22
Over the next few days, a host of other rituals were carried out, and at the
break of dawn on 6 June 1674, the climactic moment arrived. A splendid
throne ‘made of 32 maunds of gold’ was ready to receive its occupant;
water ‘from the seven holy rivers’ and from ‘famous places of pilgrimage’
had been brought in; and ‘many gold lotuses inlaid with gems of nine
varieties and various other golden flowers and clothes were distributed in
advance’.23 Shivaji first performed the mangal-snan or ablution; prayed to
‘Sri Mahadev and Sri Bhavani, his family gods’; gave ornaments and
clothes to the priests; and sat on a golden seat for the abhishek, where the
eight officials he was appointing as his ministers or pradhans, along with
the Brahmins, poured holy water over him from golden jars and vessels.
‘According to the prescribed forms of charity’, wrote Sabhasad, ‘sixteen
maha-daans (major acts of alms-giving)’ were carried out. ‘The eight
pillars of the throne were studded with gems’, and by each one stood one of
the eight ministers. Similarly, all the officials and guests stood at their
appointed spots, and the chhatra or ‘golden umbrella inlaid with gems and
having pearl fringes was held over the Raja’s head’.24 Shivaji was now
Chhatrapati, Lord of the Umbrella.
Slowly the guests trooped in, among whom was the Briton, Oxenden.
Raigad, he wrote later, recording his impressions of the rugged capital of
the newly minted Maratha kingdom, was:
fortified more by nature more than art, being of very difficult access, and [it has] but one advance
to it, which is guarded by two narrow gates, and fortified with a strong high wall and bastions
thereto. All the other part of the mountains is a direct precipice, so that it is impregnable except
[if] the treachery of some in it betrayes it. On the mountains are many strong buildings as the
Rajah’s Court and houses for other Ministers of State, to the number of about 300. It is in length
about 2½ miles and breadth 1 mile, but no pleasant trees not any sort of graine growes thereon.25
Shivaji was to hold his durbar immediately after being crowned. Oxenden,
walking in at ‘seven or eight’ in the morning:
found the Rajah seated in a magnificent throne and all the Nobles waiting on him [in] very rich
attire, his Sonne Sombagy (Sambhaji) Rajaah, Peshua Moro Punditt and a Braminy of great
eminence seated on an ascent under the Throne, the rest, as well officers of the army as others,
standing with great respect.26
Oxenden continued:
I made my obeysence at a distance and Naransinay [Narayan Shenvi, an envoy of the British] held
up the diamond ringe which was to be presented him. He presently took notice of us and ordered
our coming nearer, even to the foot of the Throne, where being vested, we were desired to retire,
which we did, but not so soon but that I took notice on each side of the throne there hung
(according to the Moores manner) on heads of gilded lances many emblems of Government and
dominion, as on the right hand were two great fishes, heads of gold with very large teeth; on the
left hand several horses’ tailes, a pair of gold scales on a very rich lance head poised equally, an
emblem of justice, and as we returned at the Palace gate there was standing two small elephants
on each side and two faire horses with gold bridles and rich furniture, which made us admire
which way they brought them up the hill, the passage being so difficult and hazardous.27
Shivaji took four momentous decisions at the time of his coronation. Apart
from appointing eight pradhans, he had given new Sanskrit names to their
ministerial posts, doing away with the long-established Persian titles. This
was a further assertion of his identity as a Hindu ruler and of his Hindu
heritage, a statement of civilizational continuity that he wished to make, as
Aurangzeb, in a puritanical turn, had banned music and imposed a series of
discriminatory levies against the Hindu population in the Mughal empire
(more on this later). Moropant Pingle, Shivaji’s peshwa or prime minister,
was to be called mukhya pradhan; Niro Nilkanth and Ramchandra Nilkanth
the mujumdars were to be jointly termed amatya; the waknis, Dattaji
Trimbak, was redesignated as mantri; Annaji Pant the surnis would now be
sachiv; Ramchandrapant Sondev would be called not dabir but sumant; and
Hambirrao Mohite would be the senapati or commander-in-chief and not
sarnobat, which came from the Persian sar-i-naubat; Ravji was pandit rao
or the royal priest, and Niraji Raoji would be the nyayadhish or chief
justice. The council would be known as the Ashta (Eight) Pradhans. At the
same time, the scholar Raghunath Pandit was asked to find replacements for
numerous Persian terms commonly used in state correspondence, and
Pandit soon prepared what came to be known as the ‘Rajyavyavaharkosh’
or dictionary of such terms. Shivaji also declared the opening of a new era,
‘Rajya Shaka’, from the date of the coronation,28 and documents sent to him
after his coronation referred to him as ‘Kshatriya Kulawatans Shri Raja
ShivaChhatrapati’. He got gold and copper coins minted with ‘Raja
ShivaChhatrapati’ inscribed on them, indicating that was the official title he
had taken for himself.29
After the coronation, Shivaji took a ride to a temple on an elephant,30 and a
few days later, having previously done his tula or weight in gold and having
‘weighed 17,000 pagodas or about 160 pounds’, made a ‘great distribution
of gold to the weight of his body and the same of silver, copper, spelter,
tin and iron and of very fine linen, camphor, salt, nails, nuts and mace, with
some of other native spices, butter, sugar’, and ‘of all fruits and all sorts of
eatables, betel and arrack included’.31
Shivaji had already established his residence a while ago at his new
capital. His mother, Jijabai, had set up her home at the base of Raigad fort,
in the little town of Pachad. Her son had constructed for her what came to
be known as the ‘Pachad wada’, which was actually a small fort with a
moat around it. Here, barely eleven days after witnessing her son’s glorious
coronation, Jijabai breathed her last at over seventy years. She died in the
knowledge that her son had done things entirely out of the ordinary. He had
never assumed any formal position under any kingdom, even when he
looked after his fathers Bijapur jagir. Afzal Khan had accused him of
having the gall to behave like an ‘independent king’, underscoring the fact
that he was not one; Aurangzeb had offered him a mansab but he had not
taken it, allowing his little son to be a mansabdar instead, even though this
was a time of enormous difficulty for him; the only thing he had accepted
was the title of ‘Rajah’, which the emperor had granted only after being
pressed by Jai Singh. He’d always held his own as a free man and a leader
of men and women, when in fact he had been surrounded by one of the
biggest empires the world had ever seen, and when, all around him in the
Deccan as well, there were older states which had for long been legal
entities. He had stood up to everyone; he had survived had more than
survived. He had in fact become a sovereign, codifying his own rule of law
and establishing his own order.
However, the loss of his mother, in the moment of his greatest triumph,
was traumatic for Shivaji. Jijabai had been the real chhatra of the
Chhatrapati, providing shelter, support and succour. She had also dabbled
occasionally in administrative matters, issuing land grants or orders
whenever someone approached her and she felt entitled to settle the matter,
and declaring donations for religious places, among other things. During
her son’s absence in Agra, she had calmly handled the situation as his
regent, when there was no certainty he would return alive. And at the time
of her death, she had left for him a sum of over 25 lakh hons.
But there are always those who prey on people’s griefs, and the time
produced one such character, a tantric priest named Nischalpuri Gosavi. He
had evidently felt sidelined as Vedic priests dominated Shivaji’s coronation
ceremony and had probably got fewer gifts than them. Nischalpuri found
grievous faults with the various rituals that had been performed and
attributed certain occurrences and tragedies, including that of the death of
Shivaji’s mother, to them. Nischalpuri’s litany of complaints was severe and
openly alarmist in character.32 As was his prescription that Shivaji should
undergo another coronation, this time according to tantric rites. Shivaji
agreed. A product of his times in many ways, he must have been worried by
the ramifications of the events around him, as spelt out by the tantric priest,
who was of course being opportunistic. The second single-day coronation
of Shivaji took place on 24 September 1674.
It was raining hard by then. The Deccan was cool and lush, but Shivaji
wasn’t resting on his laurels. His eyes were fixed on Pedgaon where the
Mughal governor Bahadur Khan had entrenched himself. The Marathas,
eventually led by Shivaji himself, cleaned up his camp, taking with them
one crore rupees which basically paid for Shivaji’s coronation.33 Two
months later, the Mughals again failed in averting a Maratha attack on
towns near Aurangabad and into northern Maharashtra, where Shivaji’s
men also raided an English factory. And again a by-now familiar pattern
played itself out: early in 1675, Shivaji proposed peace and offered his
son’s services as mansabdar, and Aurangzeb, perhaps clenching his teeth
but hobbled in the north-west, accepted it at the moment, though not
without warning Bahadur Khan not to be ‘deceived by the words of that
cunning person [Shivaji]’.34 A little while after Aurangzeb’s mansab for
Sambhaji arrived from the north, in August 1675, a Mughal delegation led
by the official Malik Barkhurdar went to Purandar to meet Shivaji. On the
first day Shivaji played the gracious host, and the guests stayed back as he
provided them excellent facilities. The next morning, he was totally
dismissive: ‘What brave deeds have you done that I should make peace
with you? Get away from this place soon, else you will be disgraced.’35
Shivaji had started negotiations with the Mughals because he saw an
opportunity in Bijapur, and he didn’t want the Mughals interfering. Not for
the first time, the Adil Shahi was in turmoil, with the feuding camps of the
Pathans (led by Bahlol Khan) and the Deccanis and Abyssinians (led by
Khawas Khan) at each others throats. Before he dismissed the Mughal
envoys at Purandar, Shivaji had taken several Bijapuri places from
Kolhapur to Karwar, with a Muslim official Ibrahim Khan serving him
excellently.
Meanwhile, both the Mughals and the British were helping the Siddis
against Shivaji, who was still continuously striving, as ever in vain, to get
the sea fort of Janjira. The renewed striving didn’t help. Shivaji never got
Janjira. Why? First, the Siddis deserve credit for this, for they invariably put
up a tremendous fight, and second, they were almost always backed by one
or the other opponent of Shivaji, sometimes by more than one opponent at a
time.36
The far more alluring prospect for both the Mughals and the Marathas was
away from the coast, in the south, where the internecine conflict in Bijapur
had turned so ugly that the leader of one of the factions, Khawas Khan, was
murdered by the other early in 1676. Shivaji’s plans in this direction were
temporarily stalled by a grave illness he suffered in January 1676, which
laid him low for a month at least. (This has not been explained in the
records, where mentions of this illness are without detail. His non-stop
exertions must have begun taking a toll.) On his recovery, the Marathas got
into action again, making some gains but suffering serious setbacks too.
The Mughals also began energetically invading Bijapur territories, having
got the Deccani faction over to their side. At this point, Shivaji reached out
to Bahadur Khan for a pact that would ensure each side did not disturb the
other as they made advances into different areas of the south: the Mughals
deep in the south and Shivaji just as deep in the south-eastern parts. Shivaji
was keen on going through Golconda to the eastern parts, all the way up to
the coast if possible. Golconda had entered into an alliance with Bijapur
against the Mughals, but the Qutub Shah, Abul Hasan, was brought around
easily by Shivaji, and the kingdom agreed to cooperate with the Marathas.
Bahadur Khan too easily agreed as the arrangement suited the Mughals as
much as it did the Marathas.
Meanwhile, just before he headed south, Shivaji, faced with an unexpected
surprise in his backyard, became instrumental in remoulding a Hindu
tradition. One day in mid-1676, his estranged confidant and erstwhile
commander-in-chief, Netaji Palkar, arrived at Raigad. After his conversion
and renaming as Muhammad Kuli Khan, Netaji had been sent by
Aurangzeb to the north-west, and he had lived there for nine long years. He
had been sent back by the emperor, possibly along with Diler Khan, for the
campaign against Bijapur. Somehow, Netaji slipped out of the Mughal
camp and arrived at Shivaji’s capital.
The point was: how was he going to be received? Hadn’t Shivaji had a
bitter falling-out with him after Netaji had arrived at Panhala too late for a
planned strike? Shivaji had fired him on the spot, and he too had gone
away, straight into Aurangzeb’s arms and into the faith Aurangzeb was
increasingly claiming to uphold. Netaji was now repentant and wanted to be
taken back into the Maratha fold, but how was that going to be possible?
Shivaji didn’t easily forgive such breaches of trust as Netaji had committed.
Just months before Netaji’s return, he had sternly warned his chief official
at Prabhavali, whom he suspected of having deliberately slowed supplies to
the Maratha fleet against the Siddis, saying that his behaviour was
unacceptable and that he would not be spared even though he was a
Brahmin if his misconduct were established.37 Moreover, the Hindu religion
did not have any practice of reconversion once someone had embraced
another faith. The religion, at that time, even had formidably strong walls
built between the various castes. What hope then could someone who had
already stepped outside the Hindu fold have of being accepted back?
Shivaji’s reaction turned out to be unexpected. He did not have any
searing words for Netaji, only those of reconciliation. And breaking all the
rules for him, he allowed him to reconvert, with rites possibly made up as
they went along. The Jedhe Chronicle matter-of-factly noted that ‘Netaji
Palkar took prayaschitta [vows of repentance] and was purified’.38 The
welcoming of his long-lost comrade by Shivaji in this fashion was
revolutionary at many levels. Netaji was given a reasonably high post,
according to historical sources, though the top posts had been taken up
since his leaving by others, and Shivaji took care not to replace or disturb
them. When Shivaji got ready for his south-eastern campaign, Netaji was
among the many generals accompanying him. So intensely focused on
ritualism at the time of his coronation, Shivaji was now turning the well-
established Hindu convention of prohibited reconversion upside down. It
was a politic move, and also political. Hadn’t his chief rival, the Mughal
emperor, in a way converted Netaji to spite Shivaji himself?
Either on the day of Dassera in 1676 or shortly thereafter, Shivaji left
Raigad for perhaps the most ambitious military enterprise of his career: his
planned conquest of the south from the Tungabhadra to Vellore, and from
Vellore to Jinji and Thanjavur. Up all the way from the Karnataka regions to
the Tamil coast! Parts of the erstwhile Vijayanagara state had mostly been
divided between Bijapur and Golconda, with Bijapur holding ‘northern and
eastern Mysore and the Madras plain’,39 and Golconda possessing the long
strip along the eastern coast from Chicacole (Srikakulam) in the Andhras to
Sadras on the Tamil lands. The Bijapur stretch had two separate governors:
Nasir Muhammad Khan at Jinji, and the Afghan Sher Khan Lodi who was
based lower south in Walgondapuram. Still further south were two Hindu
states, Madura and Thanjavur, the latter ruled by Shivaji’s brother Ekoji or
Vyankoji as a vassal of Bijapur.40
Interestingly, Vyankoji’s own hold on some of these parts had become
loose. Having taken charge of his fathers jagir after Shahaji’s death,
Vyankoji had been sent by Bijapur to Thanjavur in 1674 to put the previous
ruling dynasty there back in power and evict the invading Madura nayak.
Instead, Vyankoji had captured Thanjavur early in 1676 and, perhaps with
the example of his half-brother very much on his mind, crowned himself in
March that year.41 His capital thus had moved from Bangalore to
Thanjavur.42
Golconda was eager to exploit Bijapurs weakness and seize its south-
eastern parts, and Shivaji offered a partnership, agreeing to share the spoils.
Once Shivaji reached the capital of Golconda, Hyderabad, the exact terms
were thrashed out. Golconda had earlier agreed to pay one lakh hons a year
to Shivaji as tribute and to permit him to keep his envoy, Prahlad Niraji, at
its court. For the southern campaign, Abul Hasan Qutub Shah promised the
Marathas 3,000 hons a day, plus a military unit under the Golconda general
Mirza Amin.43 Shivaji said he’d hand over to Golconda regions not held
earlier by his father Shahaji. And Shahaji had had a lot of them: the
parganas listed in 1663 were ‘Trincomalee, Jungmohan, Vetavalam, Velpur,
Vriddhachal, Balangdas, Alwananur, Junnar, Koprapur, Tiru-kolur, Kolar
and Bangalore’.44
Shivaji’s visit as a royal guest of the Qutub Shah was an important
moment in terms of his wider acceptability and the projected, albeit limited,
Deccan solidarity. Leading an army of 50,000, Shivaji in February 1677
entered what Sabhasad called ‘the Bhaganagar (Hyderabad) territory’45 with
fanfare, winning the hearts of the Qutub Shah as well as his people with his
gestures. Shivaji gave orders to his army not to cause ‘the slightest trouble
to rayats46 in those parts. Some miscreants whose misdemeanours reached
his ears ‘were beheaded’, and wherever Shivaji made a halt, items were
purchased from the local bazaars; nothing was taken by force. The Qutub
Shah was pleased and decided to advance a few miles ahead to welcome
Shivaji. But Shivaji sent him a message, saying, ‘You should not come
forward to meet me. You are my elder brother.’ So the wazir Madanna, a
Hindu, and his brother Akanna came forward to welcome Shivaji and lead
him into the city.
The intrepid Shivaji had generated an extraordinary amount of curiosity
among the people, and when his army marched in, adorned with rich gold
ornaments, ‘citizens stood by the streets in millions to have a glimpse of the
king’. The Qutub Shah had done his guest genuine honour by adorning his
capital city. ‘Streets and lanes were all around coloured with a thin layer of
kumkum powder and saffron. Festive poles and triumphal arches were
erected and flags and standards hoisted all over.’ The women welcomed
Shivaji by ‘waving innumerable lamps around him, flowers were showered
on him’. For his part he distributed wealth and countless clothes among the
people on his way to Dad Mahal, the sultan’s palace. At the gates of the
palace, too, he sent a message to the Qutub Shah, asking him not to proceed
downstairs. ‘I will come to you, upstairs,’ he said. After he had ascended
the flight of stairs with five of his officials, Abul Hasan Qutub Shah came
forward and gave Shivaji ‘a friendly embrace’. The two sat on the same
seat, and a long conversation stretching over three hours ensued. On his
way back to his accommodation, Shivaji again ‘distributed coins to the
townspeople’. The next day Shivaji had food cooked by Madanna’s mother
at their place, after which he met the Qutub Shah, where details of the
agreement were discussed and finalized.
Shivaji stayed for a month in Hyderabad before proceeding to Jinji. On the
way there, he halted at Sri Shailya, the site of the Mallikarjuna jyotirlinga in
the Andhras, a place of stunning beauty above the river Krishna; the temple
compound, at the heart of which is the Mallikarjuna shrine, has sculptures,
pillars and inscriptions which tell the stories of Hinduism’s great epics.47
Moved by the sheer other-worldliness of the place, Shivaji, after taking a
bath in the Neel-Ganga there and praying at the temple, felt an irresistible
desire, we are told, to give up his life as an offering to the god, but was
dissuaded from doing so with reminders about all the duties that remained
for him to perform.48 Fascinatingly, the theme of Shiva is in a way a
constant in Shivaji’s life from the time his grandfather repairs a shrine in
the Deccan, his own naming, his worship of the deity, the war cry of Har
Har Mahadev that he adopted, and Aurangzeb’s razing of a number of
famous temples dedicated to Shiva, to this visit to Sri Shailya, where
Shivaji is moved enough to want to give up everything.
The victory in the south was a sweeping one. At the end of May 1677, the
commander of Jinji, Nasir Muhammad Khan, surrendered the fort to
Shivaji. In the first week of June, Vellore was encircled, and the Bijapur
garrison there led by Abdullah Khan held it ‘resolutely for fourteen
months’, but Shivaji kept hammering away, resulting in the gallant defence
finally collapsing. The Jesuits of the region wrote that once Shivaji took
over the district of Jinji, he ‘applied all the energy of his mind, and all the
resources of his dominions to the fortifications of all the principal places.
He constructed new ramparts around Jinji, dug ditches, erected towers.’49
The Bijapur governor of those parts, Sher Khan Lodi, and officials of the
French East India Company, who had their factory at Pondicherry, began a
dialogue on how to deal with Shivaji. Lodi and the French had often
worked together, the Afghan taking the assistance of the firangs against
intra-kingdom rivals. The French governor Francois Martin saw that ‘the
overthrow of Chircam [Sher Khan] was already in sight’50 and prioritized
his own factory’s interests. He sent a Brahmin envoy to Shivaji requesting
that the French territories be spared. Shivaji, wrote the French governor,
assured our envoy that we might stay in complete security at Pondicherry without taking the side
of either party; that if we offered the least insult to his people there would be no quarter for us or
for those of our people who were in the [French] factory at Rajapour, that he would send an
(h)avaldar in a few days to govern Pondicherry and that we might have to live with him in the
same manner as we had done with the officers of Chircam.51
The French agreed not to step in. Before Shivaji’s forces arrived, however,
the French governor went and met his friend Sher Khan Lodi and asked him
what he was going to do. Lodi was frank in the private conversation. He
said:
If Sivagy sent only four to five thousand horse against him he would hazard a battle, but if he
came with all his forces he (Chircam) would have to retire under the guns of one of his fortresses,
and that what caused him the greatest trouble was the lack of funds.52
Martin told him sympathetically that ‘we were touched to see him in so
little state [ill-equipped] to resist Shivaji, whose army consisted of twelve
thousand horse and many thousand infantry’.53 As Lodi ran for the woods of
Ariyalur in Tiruchirapalli, Shivaji chased him and caught up with him at the
end of June. On 5 July, Lodi surrendered all his territories to Shivaji.
From there, Shivaji moved his camp at Tirumalawadi, 16 kilometres to the
north of Thanjavur. Here, two agents of the French who witnessed the
arrangements recorded that ‘the camp of Sivagy was without pomp, without
women, there were no baggages, only two tents but of simple cloth, coarse
and very scanty, one for him and the other for his prime minister’.54 It was
at this camp, on the northern bank of the Kolerun river, that Shivaji invited
his half-brother to meet him.
Initially there was a lot of warmth as the two brothers spent eight days
together, exchanging gifts and presents. Then the reunion soured as Shivaji
pressed his paternal claims. Sabhasad refers to Shivaji asking Vyankoji for
their fathers twelve birandes, an archaic, out-of-use word which has been
commonly translated to mean titles, including robes of honour.55 ‘You
should give me only the 12 birandes of my father you have, and I shall
display them. Of course I can have new ones, but I am demanding these, as
I should have what was earned by my father,’ Shivaji said.56 Was the
fathers southern jagir also discussed? Sabhasad is silent on this. But the
French governor of Pondicherry, Francois Martin, noted that ‘Ecugy [Ekoji
or Vyankoji] had in his possession one-third of the lands of Gingy which
their common parent Sagimagro [Shahaji Maharaj] held on his part. There
were also his personal property and valuable effects. Sivagy demanded his
share of these goods.’57
Vyankoji did not yield and, in the silence of the night, quietly fled from
Shivaji’s camp, taking a boat across the Kolerun river to his side of the
territory. Shivaji was quite confounded to hear the next morning that his
half-brother had escaped:
Why has he fled? Was I going to imprison him? What should I do with the birandes? My own
birandes have spread over the eight directions … My fame has spread, what then should I do with
those birandes? I had asked for them as one should have his patrimony. If he did not like to part
with them, he was at liberty not to give them. Why did he flee for nothing? He is young, very
young, and he has acted like a child.58
Before leaving for home, Shivaji appointed Raghunath Narayan Hanmante
as mujumdar or auditor for the newly acquired parts and temporarily kept
back his commander-in-chief Hambirrao Mohite for defence of the southern
territories.59 On his way back, the Mysore region up the ghats which
Vyankoji had ruled was easy: Kolar, Koppal, Balapur, Belavdi and
Sampagaon were captured, though in Mysore itself local ruler
Chikkadevaraja beat back the Marathas, and Shivaji appointed Rango
Narayan as his governor for his section of Mysore.60 At the end of the year,
after skirmishes between Vyankoji’s army and Shivaji’s, in one of which
Shivaji’s general Santaji Bhosle had to backtrack,61 a truce was established:
Shivaji got to keep the Mysore uplands and Jinji, and Vyankoji retained his
lands south of the Kolerum river and a tiny part to the rivers north.62
Shivaji’s southern expedition had been a smashing success. He had seized
territory which yielded 20 lakh hons a year, captured 100 forts, destroyed
Bijapurs influence in those parts, and crossed over from the Marathi-
speaking territories into the Kannada heartland and parts of Tamil country.
The campaign was proof of the implications of Shivaji’s coronation not
merely for Maharashtra but for the shape of Indian history. Shivaji’s state
was no doubt deeply a Maratha state, but his conquests encompassing
present-day Karnataka, Andhra and Tamil Nadu provided the clearest
indication that he was setting himself up not just as a king of the Marathi-
speaking parts but as Aurangzeb’s principal rival across the length and
breadth of peninsular Hindustan, as India was then known.
Golconda got absolutely nothing out of Shivaji’s expedition despite having
borne some of the costs and having sent a 5,000-strong military unit. Not a
single fort. Shivaji also refused to hand over Jinji when the Qutub Shah
demanded it. Aggrieved, the Qutub Shah walked out of his alliance with
Shivaji and looked for an understanding with Siddi Masaud, who had taken
over as the new regent at Bijapur. Unlike the Afghan Bahlol Khan who had
fallen ill during Shivaji’s absence from the Deccan and had died, Masaud
was a Deccani, and the Qutub Shah was more comfortable dealing with
him. Meanwhile, Diler Khan had taken over from Bahadur Khan as Mughal
governor of the Deccan and had tried to attack Golconda but had been
repulsed. He, however, got Bijapurs new regent to pledge allegiance to the
Mughal empire and successfully signed him up for action against Shivaji.
Even better for him, Diler Khan managed to win over someone who was
incredibly close to Shivaji. A piece of Shivaji’s heart, as it were.
Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. 5, 392.
This account of Chhatrasal was penned by his court poet Gore Lal, better known as ‘Lal Kavi’. The
official account written in verse, ‘Chhatra Prakash’, covers events till 1707. Quoted in G.S.
Sardesai, Shivaji Souvenir (Keshav Bhikaji Dhawale, 1927),154–160, published as part of
Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, ed. B.K. Apte (Bombay
University, 1975), 141–144.
Ibid.
If we leave aside Chhatrasal’s official chroniclers hyperbole, the question arises: was Shivaji
strategizing here? Possibly, because if unrest broke out in Bundelkhand, a new and independent
front in the north would be created against the Mughals, and this might deplete the energies they
could expend elsewhere.
Letter of 29 May 1666 from Rajput official Parkaldas to Kalyandas, quoted in Mehendale (English),
330.
Ramdas wrote his poem dedicated to Shivaji, ‘Nischayacha Mahameru’ circa 1670–1674.
Y.N. Deodhar, ‘Shivaji and Golconda’, Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary
Commemoration Volume, ed. B.K. Apte (Bombay University, 1975), 132.
English Records on Shivaji, 143–144.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 266–271.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Account of Thomas Niccolls, 19 May to 17 June 1673, English Records on Shivaji, 251–257.
Ibid.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 271.
The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. 21, 48–49; The Sahyadri Companion, 136–137.
Robert Orme (1782), quoted in Kincaid, The Grand Rebel, 264.
Cosme da Guarda, Life of the Celebrated Sevagy, quoted in Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, edited by
Sen, 2.
Oxenden’s account of the coronation, English Records on Shivaji, 371.
Gaga Bhatt’s ‘Shivrajyabhishek Prayog’, Jedhe Shakavali and Sabhasad quoted in Mehendale
(English), 484–485, and Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 237–238.
Sabhasad, 114.
Gaga Bhatt’s ‘Shivrajyabhishek Prayog’, Jedhe Shakavali and Sabhasad quoted in Mehendale
(English), 484–485, and Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 237–238.
Sabhasad, 115.
Ibid., 118–119.
Oxenden’s letter of 13 July 1674, English Records on Shivaji, 372.
Ibid, 375.
Ibid, 375.
The era was to start from Jyestha Shuddha 13, 1596 (6 June 1674) according to the Hindu calendar.
Mehendale (English), 488.
Sabhasad, 116; Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 23–25; Mehendale (English), 488.
Mehendale (English), 487.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 239; Mehendale (English), 487.
Mehendale (English), 489–490; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 244–245.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 181; Purandare, Raja Shiv Chhatrapati, Part 2, 379–381. The
Imperial Gazetteer.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 248.
Ibid.
Ibid., 245, 54.
Letter No. 1718 from Shivakalin Patrasar Sangraha, Vol. 2, quoted in ibid., 246, eds. N.C. Kelkar and
D.V. Apte, Shiva Charitra Karyalaya, Pune, 1930.
Quoted in ibid., 261.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 182–183.
Ibid.; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 268.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 269.
Ibid., 272–273.
Ibid.
Letter of 11 March 1663 of Ali Adil Shah II to all the desais and nayakwars, quoted in Sarkar, House
of Shivaji, 89.
Sabhasad, 125.
This account is based on the work of Sabhasad, who was most probably an eyewitness to the events.
I have relied on two translations: Sen, Life of Siva Chhatrapati (Sabhasad), 120–124, and
Patwardhan and Rawlinson, Source Book of Maratha History, 164–166.
Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (Three Rivers Press, Random House, 2012), 250.
Sabhasad, 124.
Quoted in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 283.
Francois Martin’s account in Sen, Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, 281.
Ibid., 278.
Ibid., 284.
Ibid., 285.
Ibid., 305–306.
Sabhasad, 125.
Ibid., 125–126.
Sen, Foreign Biographies of Shivaji, 302–303.
Ibid.
Ibid., 129.
Ibid., 127–129; Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 289–290.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 238.
Ibid., 239.
OceanofPDF.com
14
The Final Phase
Shivaji’s son Sambhaji had been barely two years old when he had lost his
mother Saibai in 1659. He had grown up under the shelter and watch of his
father and, importantly, his grandmother, Jijabai. He had lived through an
unforgettable experience in Agra with his father and had been part of his
thrilling escape. Shivaji had appointed tutors to educate him, and the boy
had developed, much like his paternal grandfather, a particular liking for the
Sanskrit language, which he would go on to master. From the early 1670s,
Shivaji had started getting him involved in important administrative work,
and at the time of the coronation, Sambhaji, then seventeen years old, had
been given the honour of sitting ‘on an ascent’, as the British envoy had
remarked.1
Once Shivaji became king, Sambhaji naturally became the heir apparent.
But there was trouble – of an all-too-familiar nature among royal families –
brewing within the household.
Just as Sambhaji had been given due honour at his fathers coronation, so
had Soyrabai, as the seniormost among Shivaji’s surviving wives. Soyrabai
had given birth to a son on 24 February 1670. He was named Rajaram. The
boy was just four at the time of Shivaji’s crowning, but Soyrabai already
seemed keen to make him, rather than the elder son, the heir apparent.
Shivaji had only these two sons, though he had married eight times (most of
which were political matrimonial alliances in view of his rising power).2
During her lifetime Sambhaji’s mother Saibai was his seniormost wife, and
after her death, Soyrabai. He had six daughters as well, all of whom were
married into various Maratha families, but they have been largely
invisibilized by the historical record as they played no role in his entire
political enterprise, subsequent to their marriages. Three of these daughters
Sakwarbai or Sakhubai, Ranubai and Ambikabai were born to his first
wife, Saibai; and three other wives bore him one daughter each: Soyrabai
gave birth to Dipabai, Sakwarbai to Kamaljabai, and Sagunabai was the
mother of Rajkuvarbai. Shivaji’s other four wives Kashibai, Putlabai,
Laxmibai and Gunwantabai – did not have any children.3
When Shivaji had fallen severely ill for a month early in 1676, rumours
started swirling in parts of the Deccan that he had died. It was around this
time that news of serious differences within Shivaji’s household spread all
across the Deccan. Among them were reports of Sambhaji’s allegedly
unruly conduct. But Sabhasad who later worked with Soyrabai’s son
Rajaram, whom she was setting up against Sambhaji – makes no mention of
them, and the historian Kamal Gokhale, who wrote a scholarly biography in
Marathi of Sambhaji, says stories of Shivaji’s elder son’s alleged
misconduct began to originate only after the coronation of 1674 and were
most likely spread by Soyrabai to discredit him.4
What was nevertheless true was that tensions had started rising in the
family, and Sambhaji appeared to have been extremely dissatisfied about
his place within it, and with how things were moving. In 1674, his
grandmother, his major source of solace, had also died. So, on 13 December
1678, Sambhaji, at the age of twenty-one, took a step that left his father
stupefied. He left Satara, where he was staying at the time, for Pedgaon and
joined the Mughals under Diler Khan.5 The records don’t make clear what
the immediate trigger was for his defection.
For the Mughal empire, this was an extraordinary slice of luck, but it
would not last long. Sambhaji was with Diler Khan when the Mughal
governor attacked and seized the fort of Bhupalgad to the south-west of
Pandharpur from the Marathas in April 1679. Diler Khan treated the
garrison that was captured, and the local village population that had moved
into the fort for shelter, with great cruelty. One hand of each member of the
garrison was hacked off, and many villagers were reduced to becoming
slaves.6 Diler Khan also launched a campaign against the Adil Shahi, and
Siddi Masaud wrote to Shivaji for help as the Mughals threatened the state
capital of Bijapur. Shivaji immediately offered his assistance, sending a
force of ‘10,000 horse and 10,000 oxen laden with grains’ to protect
Bijapur, and also personally carrying out raids in Mughal territories of the
Deccan, including Jalna, which was both pillaged and captured.7
Diler Khan had to lift the siege he had mounted on Bijapur, partly because
it was well defended, and partly because the top Mughal decision-makers
could not agree on whether an attack should be launched on the Adil Shahi
capital. On his way back, Diler Khan sacked the town of Tikota and, for no
reason, imprisoned 3,000 of the town’s ordinary inhabitants. From there, he
moved to Athani, where again he perpetrated atrocities on the populace
despite the complete absence of any provocation.8
Sambhaji, having grown up in the Shivaji ethos, where wanton harassment
especially of ordinary civilians was not the norm, was immensely disturbed
by Diler Khan’s actions and decided that he did not really fit into the
Mughal scheme of things.9 He escaped from Diler Khan’s camp on 20
November 1679, and father and son were reunited, after a rebellion that
lasted less than a year but sent shock waves through the Maratha kingdom.
The issue of succession nevertheless remained unresolved, though,
according to Sabhasad, Shivaji planned to divide his territories between his
two sons. Sabhasad’s version states succinctly that there was ‘much
rejoicing’ as father and son met each other after almost a year of serious
separation.
Shivaji said to Sambhaji:
My boy, do not leave me. There is enmity between us and Aurangzeb. He intended to commit
treachery against you. But the Sri [God] has kindly rescued you and brought you safely back. A
great deed has been done. Now you, my eldest son, have grown big, and I have learnt that it is in
your mind that you should have a separate kingdom. This is also in my interest. I shall give you a
kingdom then. I have two sons. You, Sambhaji, are one; and Rajaram is the second. So I shall
divide all my kingdom into two. The kingdom of Jinji stretching from the Tungabhadra to the
Kaveri is one. The second is a kingdom on the other side of the Tungabhadra extending up to
the river Godavari You are my eldest son. I confer on you the kingdom of the Karnataka; the
kingdom on this side I give to Rajaram. You two sons should rule over these two kingdoms. I
shall henceforth meditate on the Sri and thus secure my welfare.10
To this, Sambhaji replied, ‘My fortune lies at the feet of Your Majesty. I
will live on milk and rice [at peace] and meditate at your feet.’11
The anguish of separation having been acute on both sides, the exhalation
of relief at the reunion was similarly considerable. Shivaji had zealously
laboured to build his own raj, and he fervently desired that his elder son
Sambhaji should be on his side to secure its present and its future.
Thoughts of all of his family members were evidently occupying Shivaji’s
mind, for soon thereafter, he wrote a letter to his half-brother Ekoji or
Vyankoji urging him to take proper care of his southern territories; as we
have seen, the two brothers had partitioned their fathers southern estate
between them. Shivaji had heard that Ekoji had suddenly withdrawn into
his shell, had turned indifferent to his own state machinery, was neglecting
affairs of state, and was seriously contemplating becoming an ascetic.
Shivaji reminded him of their fathers renown as a military general, of his
own ceaseless striving that had helped him establish his own kingdom; he
urged Ekoji not to entertain thoughts of turning into a recluse but to take
care of his own health and matters of state, and to expand his state and run
it competently so that he could earn ‘fortune and renown’. ‘If you exert
your best efforts and attain fortune and happiness in those parts, I will only
be contented and full of pride that my younger brother has accomplished so
much,’ Shivaji wrote in his outreach to his half-brother.12
Around the same time, Shivaji dictated to his secretary, Neel Prabhu (who
wrote his Persian letters), easily his most memorable letter, a letter that
reflected the breadth of his thought, the depth of his belief in the oneness of
humanity, and his distaste, as a Hindu ruler, for religious bigotry and
intolerance. Shivaji had, while underlining the Hindu nature of his reign,
practised a policy of religious tolerance in peace and in war, enjoining upon
his soldiers and followers to treat Muslim women, Islamic saints and other
people of the religion and the holy book of the religion itself, the Quran,
with the greatest respect. He had continued in his territories the inams or
grants to mosques, tombs and any other commemorative spots which had
been given by previous rulers. In recruiting soldiers, too, he had never been
hesitant about taking in those of the Islamic faith, and his two Muslim navy
admirals and other officials were examples of the religious equality he
practised conscientiously.
Shivaji’s letter was addressed to Aurangzeb who, apart from targeting
temples, had also taken to targeting the Hindu population within the Mughal
empire. He had, in the mid-1660s, issued an ordinance stating that Hindus
in the empire had to pay 5 per cent customs duty while Muslims could pay
half of it; two years later, he had exempted Muslim traders from paying
customs duty altogether and retained the 5 per cent imposed on Hindus. He
had also started offering positions and handing out promises of settlement
of property disputes and exemption from prison terms for ‘unbelievers’ who
agreed to convert to Islam. Gradually, only Muslim collectors of rent were
permitted and Hindu chief clerks and auditors were ordered to be sacked; he
walked back on this step subsequently, after he realized the practical
impossibility of doing such a thing. Some converts were also paraded on
elephants, and some were paid very small allowances.13 In April 1679,
Aurangzeb’s religious policy was on steroids: he imposed the jaziya, a tax
for ‘unbelievers’ who lived in a theocratic Islamic state, on the Hindus. The
Hindus of Delhi appealed to him to withdraw the inequitable law; when a
big group stood in front of the Jama Masjid to make a plea in this regard, he
sent elephants in their direction to crush all those who came in their path
and disperse others.
Shivaji was angry and upset that Aurangzeb had taken a fanatical path.
Asking Aurangzeb to desist from implementing such discriminatory
policies, he stated in his letter:
To the Emperor Alamgir. This firm well-wisher Shivaji, deeply grateful for divine favour and
your kindness as clear as daylight, begs to inform your Majesty:
I returned from your presence without seeking your permission. It is my misfortune. But I am
ready to serve you in every possible way. May your kindness be felt by everybody. As a well-
wisher I am placing some matters before you.
Recently it has come to my ears that owing to your war against me, your treasury has become
empty. You have decided to meet the expenditure through the imposition of jaziya on the Hindus.
Your Majesty, Akbar, the founder of your empire, ruled for 52 years. He had adopted the
excellent policy of treating with peace and equality Christians, Jews, Muslims, Dadupanthis,
Stargazers, Malakis, Atheists, Brahmins, Jains, in fact all the communities. His aim was to ensure
the welfare and protection of all. That is why he came to be known as the jagadguru. The result
was that to whatever direction he turned, success and glory attended his arms. He brought most of
the country under his sway.
After him, Nooruddin Jahangir ruled for 22 years. He led a life full of good deeds and became
immortal. Shah Jahan ruled for 32 years. He too made his life fruitful through good deeds. That is
why these rulers were successful in whatever direction they turned. During their rule a number of
provinces and forts came under their sway. They have passed away, but their name endures
One measure of their greatness is that Alamgir has tried to imitate them but without success. He is
at a loss to understand why this should be so.
The previous rulers, had they so desired, had certainly the power to impose jaziya. But they felt
that all men [and women], big and small, were the children of God, and all religions but means to
the worship of the Almighty. They never allowed the feeling of religious hatred even to touch
them. The memory of their kindness and the good deeds they did is always fresh in the world. All
men great and small praise and bless them. During their rule the people had peace, and their
glory increased.
But during your regime, many provinces and forts have gone out of your hands. The remaining
provinces and forts too will be lost to you. I will not spare any effort to ruin your provinces. Your
subjects are crushed. The income from your parganas and mahals is decreasing day by day. It is
difficult to realize even 1,000 from places the income of which was one lakh previously. Poverty
is striking kings and princes. The plight of nobles and mansabdars is apparent Your soldiers
are discontented, the Muslims are in anguish, and the Hindus are scorched. Men are pining for
bread They are in such deep distress, and yet you have imposed jaziya on them. How could
you do this? This evil news will spread from east to west. People will say, ‘The Emperor of
Hindustan has taken a begging bowl and is out to realize jaziya from Brahmins, Jains, Sadhus,
Jogis, Sanyasis, Bairagis, the poor and the starving. He takes pride in doing so. He is laying in
dust the name of the Taimur dynasty.’ Such will be the deep feeling of the people.
Your Majesty, in the Quran, God has been described as the Rabbul Alameen, the Lord of the
entire universe, and not as Rabbul Mussalmin, the Lord of the Mussalmans. In fact, Islam and
Hinduism are both beautiful manifestations of the Divine Spirit. The call for prayers is given in
the mosques, bells ring to the Divine glory in temples. Anyone bearing fanaticism and religious
hatred must be said to be acting against the commands of God. To presume to draw lines on these
pictures is verily to lay blame on the Divine Artist [God]. To point out blemishes in any creation
only means you are blaming the creator. Do not do so.
Jaziya cannot be justified on any grounds. It is an innovation in India. This is unjust. If you feel
that on grounds of religion and justice the imposition of this tax is essential, you should first
realize it from Raja Raj Singh. For, he is the leader of the Hindus. It will be then not be difficult to
collect it from this well-wisher.14
The bluntness of the letter indicated Shivaji was now happy to burn all his
boats with the emperor. As Chhatrapati, he now felt far more well
positioned to admonish Aurangzeb directly and to point out the
unreasonableness, blatant bias and criminality of his discriminatory faith-
based policies and actions.
His reflections, in his writing, might have been profound, but events were
still allowing Shivaji no rest.
While tense relations with the Mughals continued, Shivaji did conclude a
peace treaty with the British early the next year, that is, 1680, over the
contentious issue of the island of Khanderi, which had suddenly blown up a
few months before. The Marathas had begun fortifying the small island,
situated right opposite British-controlled Bombay, when a squad of alarmed
English officials recklessly attempted to land there, drawing fire from the
Marathas and losing a number of soldiers. The British naval fleet was
considerably more advanced than that of the Marathas, and so were their
guns; the Marathas took refuge in Naigaon but carried on with the fight and
with their work on the island, refusing to vacate it. They also managed
somehow to keep the island if not exactly awash in supplies, then
sufficiently provided at all times, without exposing their fleet to British
guns. At one point in the conflict, after the British had solicited the help of
the Siddis, most of Khanderi’s defenders wanted to give in, but according to
the Company’s officials, Shivaji’s official Mainak Bhandari, his son and a
Muslim soldier of Shivaji swore to keep fighting as Shivaji had apparently
sent word that he didn’t want them to quit.15 As the historian
Setumadhavrao Pagadi put it, in this case, the Marathas had in a way
adapted guerrilla tactics to naval operations.16
The affair of Khanderi had ended honourably for the Marathas. But there
was ferment on other fronts. Siddi Masaud of Bijapur had turned against the
Marathas and joined hands with the Mughals; the Siddis were still holding
on to Janjira (with Shivaji still bent on taking it); and the Portuguese were,
just like the British and the Dutch, swaying towards whichever side suited
them best.
Conflict was of course part and parcel of Shivaji’s life, but now a serious
personal health setback complicated the picture. In March that year, Shivaji
celebrated the marriage of his younger son Rajaram to the daughter of his
late lieutenant Prataprao Gujar at Raigad; Sambhaji was at Panhala then,
Shivaji having kept him away, presumably to protect him from the intrigues
of Soyrabai.17 Days after Rajaram’s wedding, in the middle of March,
Shivaji took to his bed at Raigad with high fever. Twice earlier, after his
escape from Agra, he had had serious illnesses lasting up to a month, once
immediately after his return in 1666 and then exactly a decade later, in
1676. He had recovered from these. But the relentless pace of his life had
clearly taken its toll; in the past few years, there had also been domestic
strife, over the question of succession. Shivaji never recovered from this
illness. Less than two months after he had turned fifty years old, close to
noon on 3 April 1630, he had a strong feeling that death was close at hand.
According to Sabhasad, he summoned all his counsellors and trusted aides,
including his dear friend Tanaji Malusare’s brother Suryaji and his half-
brother Hiroji Farzand who had heroically taken Shivaji’s place in Agra
during his famed escape.18
‘The term of my life has ended. I am going to Kailas to see my Sri [God],’
Shivaji said as they all gathered around him. ‘At these words from the
king,’ Sabhasad wrote, ‘everyone’s throat was choked, and tears began
streaming from their eyes.’19 Looking at them, Shivaji said, ‘Do not grieve.
This is a world where death is inevitable. All who were born in this world
had to depart. Keep your mind free of sorrow and be of pure thought. You
may now withdraw. I will now meditate on the Sri [the Divine].’
Having sent everyone out, ‘Shivaji bathed in the waters of the Bhagirathi
[Ganga], applied sacred ash on his body, put on the rudraksha or holy beads
and through yoga, breathed his last.’ The day Shivaji died, 3 April 1680,
was a Saturday, and the time was around noon. For the cremation of their
great king, the Marathas used sandalwood and bel wood.20
In the rival Mughal camp, Khafi Khan wrote, ‘The infidel, the unbeliever,
has gone to hell.’21 And the Britishers, who had heard so much about his
extraordinary exploits, were scarcely willing to believe word of his passing
even eight months later, in December 1680. They wrote, ‘Shivaji has died
so often that some begin to think him immortal. It is certain little belief can
be given to any report of his death till experience shows it.’22
Sabhasad wrote the following at the time of Shivaji’s death:
[Shivaji’s] authority was invoked from the banks of the Narmada to Rameshwar. He conquered
these provinces and defeated armies and annexed the territories of the four Badshahis (on land),
the Adil Shahi, the Kutub Shahi, the Nizam Shahi and the Mughlai, and the twenty-two Badshahs
of the sea. A new kingdom was founded and the Maratha Badshah became a duly enthroned
Chhatrapati or Lord of the Umbrella.23
Shivaji had survived challenge after demanding challenge, overcome
difficulty after gargantuan difficulty, and braved crisis after burgeoning
crisis to emerge as a super-survivor against forces that were usually vastly
superior. And he had created, from scratch, an independent state that held
its own against one of the most powerful empires the world had seen.
Shivaji lit more than just a fuse under the foundations of the Mughal
empire: he launched a blazing fire that eventually consumed Aurangzeb’s
empire and changed the face of all of Hindustan.
Hoping to wipe out the Marathas who refused to give up after Shivaji’s
death, Aurangzeb came down to the Deccan and spent close to twenty-five
years there, struggling to accomplish his goal. His best officials, military
and administrative, roamed the land of Shivaji, to stamp out his successes;
his durbar was held there; the members of his household and top generals
Muslim and Hindu, including Rajputs were desperately keen to go back
home to the north after spending years attempting to subdue Shivaji’s
successors. But it was the Mughal empire that was corroded, slowly but
surely, first due to the indomitable courage of Sambhaji and then the
inexorable exertions, despite many damaging internal differences, of
Rajaram, Rajaram’s wife Tarabai and Sambhaji’s son, Shahu.
Shivaji was succeeded by Sambhaji, and it was in 1681–82 that
Aurangzeb embarked on his long-contemplated Deccan mission where he
hoped to eliminate all the rival kingdoms. Aurangzeb soon destroyed the
Bijapur and Golconda states, taking their rulers captive. Sambhaji, who kept
up the Maratha fight as the new Chhatrapati, was taken a prisoner by the
Mughals from Sangameshwar in Ratnagiri in 1689. He was taken to the
Mughal camp at Bahadurgarh and paraded through the town on
Aurangzeb’s orders. The moment Aurangzeb saw Shivaji’s son appearing
before him as a prisoner, the Mughal emperor knelt to the ground to thank
his god. Sambhaji was told to submit to him or face the worst possible
consequences, but he refused to bow down and instead heaped abuse on
Aurangzeb. That same night, Aurangzeb ordered Sambhaji’s eyes to be
gouged out. Even after the blinding, Sambhaji was tortured horrendously
for a fortnight on Aurangzeb’s instructions that Shivaji’s son must be done
to death because he had ‘slain, captured and dishonoured Muslims and
plundered the cities of Islam’. On 11 March 1689 Sambhaji’s limbs were
hacked off and he was executed, and after that, in a display of utmost
bestiality, his severed head was taken around the main cities of the Deccan
for all to see.24
Unapologetic, unchanged and undaunted, Shivaji’s Marathas crowned his
younger son Rajaram at Raigad. The Mughals pursued Rajaram relentlessly,
forcing him to seek shelter at Jinji to keep up the confrontation from there;
Sambhaji’s wife Yesubai was imprisoned by the Mughals along with their
son Shahu. Inside Jinji fort and encircled by the Mughals, Rajaram finally
escaped with his wife Tarabai in 1697, and once back in the Deccan, the
Marathas under him launched a counter-attack against Aurangzeb, for the
first time going north of the Narmada river in 1699.25 Rajaram died the
following year, at the age of just thirty, but his wife Tarabai carried on the
fight; while the succession struggle was still far from resolved, from then
on, the Marathas as a whole went from strength to strength.
When Aurangzeb died in the Deccan, in Aurangabad, in February 1707,
never having gone back to Agra or Delhi again in the second phase of his
career in his determination to stamp out the Marathas, Shivaji’s people were
still a growing power and the decline of the Mughal empire had firmly set
in. Towards the end of Aurangzeb’s life, he was left a disappointed man,
frustrated in his ambition to snuff the life out of Shivaji’s Marathas. Soon
the Marathas, under the leadership of the Peshwas, would go across all of
the north and the east; in the east, they would reach Bengal, and in the
north, they would go all the way up to Attock, in the Punjab province of
modern-day Pakistan, before the decline of their own power began post
1760 along with the rise of the British. Shivaji had, entirely on his personal
initiative and his brilliant leadership, lit the fire of their freedom, a fire that
ultimately blazed through Aurangzeb’s empire.
Oxenden’s letter, English Records on Shivaji, 375.
The names of Shivaji’s eight wives, with their maiden surnames where available, are: Saibai
Nimbalkar, Soyrabai Mohite, Sakwarbai Gaikwad, Kashibai Jadhav, Putlabai Palkar, Sagunabai
Shirke, Laxmibai and Gunwantabai. Mehendale (English), 680; Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2, 1130.
Mehendale (Marathi), Vol. 2, 1137–1138.
Kamal Gokhale, Shivaputra Sambhaji (Marathi) (Continental Prakashan, [1971], 2019), 45–72.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 300–301.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 185.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 309–311; Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 186.
Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 315.
Ibid., 316.
Sabhasad, 131–132.
Ibid.
Letter from Thanjavurche Rajgharane, quoted in Mehendale (English), 615–616.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 126.
I have preferred Pagadi’s translation of the letter to Sarkars excessively flowery style, which
provides a literal translation but muddles the text quite a bit. Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 311–314;
Sarkars translation is in History of Aurangzib, Vol. 3, 325–329.
Details of the fight in Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 319–325.
Ibid.
Gokhale, Shivputra Sambhaji, 71.
Sabhasad, 149.
Ibid., 151–152. There is much else that Sabhasad quotes him as saying, especially about how
Maratha matters would pan out after him. But as Sabhasad was writing all this in 1694, that is,
fourteen years after Shivaji’s death, and as he was also writing for Shivaji’s younger son Rajaram, it
is best discarded as perhaps narrated ‘to orderin view of the succession dispute that subsequently
unfolded. About the overall situation at Raigad at the time of Shivaji’s death and the broad
conversation that happened, though, he is indeed credible.
Ibid., 153.
Quoted in Mehendale (English), 617.
Letter from Hugli to Bombay, 13 December 1680, in ibid., 618.
Ibid., 153–154.
Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 252–253.
Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 177–181.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Chiki Sarkar and Parth Mehrotra of Juggernaut Books for making
this book possible.
Thanks to Anjali Puri who cast a sharp critical eye on the text her
interventions as editor were extremely valuable. Thanks to Rimli Borooah,
my copy editor, for diligently working on the text. My thanks to Devangana
Ojha, Arani Sinha and to the entire Juggernaut Books team for the way this
book has turned out.
My heartfelt thanks to two eminent Sanskrit scholars: Dr. Amrita Narlikar,
president of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and professor
of international relations at Hamburg University, and her mother Aruna
Narlikar. They deciphered a key part of the poet Parmanand’s Sanskrit text
Shivabharat for me.
And thanks in particular to all the scholars of the brilliant historical
movement in the Deccan towards the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century, whose relentless efforts resulted in the
unearthing of documents related to Chhatrapati Shivaji’s life and times.
Without my family’s firm support, there’s no way I could have written this
book while still holding a full-time job. So a big thank you, as ever, to my
wife Swapna and son Vikrant, my parents Jagdish and Jyotsna Purandare,
and my brother Kunal and sister-in-law Avani.
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